I hate and curse France Telecom! This time the fault is clearly theirs and it is not a technical problem: it is, the guy on the phone told me, a “scheduled hardware update”, but apparently not scheduled enough that they would inform their clients about it! So at 1:40AM (that's 2003-07-31T01:40+0200), poof, no ADSL any more. And I'm told (without any kind of apology) that it is to last the whole night. Now you might say, well, since it's past 2AM, all I have to do is now go to bed and things will be working in the morning; only it doesn't work like this: there are things that I just have to do tonight, and doing them with a basic analog modem instead of ADSL is going to take just about all night.
It's amazing how the “computer excuse” makes us accept what would be otherwise unacceptable levels of (mis)service: it would not for one second be deemed acceptable for an ordinary telephone line to be interrupted for five hours in a row, not even from 2AM to 7AM at the deadest of summer—unless it had a very good excuse like a natural calamity, the phone company would immediately be sued for damages. But an ADSL line they think they can cut with no prior notice. I think I'd better stop writing at this point, or I will be saying some very dirty words.