Mark Andrews – mystery packages as Buzby joins the internet age

This was odd. I had not ordered anything, I very rarely do. And had certainly not, to my knowledge paid for anything.

Presumably it had been delivered to the wrong house? Maybe some poor sap was worrying where their parcel had got to. Or haranguing the supplier, demanding to know why it hadn't been delivered.

Closer inspection revealed it was very clearly addressed to me, and appeared to be some kind of electronic device dispatched by British Telecom. It appeared to relate to a letter I received in the post a couple of weeks earlier; something about copper cables and my 'landline', which I think is jobsworth-speak for the 'house phone'.

Trouble is, if there are two things guaranteed to make my eyes glaze over with boredom, they are bureaucratic jargon and new technology. And it had been a long day, during the height of the election campaign. So naturally, I dropped the letter in my 'I'll look at it when I'm less busy' file. And forgot about it.

A couple of weeks after that, the phone bill came. A bit high, I thought, but it always is. I've never understood why it's always so high given that I never actually use it to make outgoing phone calls. But then again, I don't really know why I still have a house phone, apart from the perhaps outdated belief that people who don't have them are a bit Arfur Daley. And the joy of receiving calls from people in other countries telling me that the computer I don't have needs updating.

Trouble is, I never have the time to do anything about that either. So the rip-off phone bill joined the letter from Buzby and the unsolicited parcel in my 'to do' file. As you will probably gather, my secretarial services sideline has yet to get off the ground.

Anyhow, it was during last week's internet 'outage' – another horrible word – that the penny finally dropped. Trying to see if the office phone system had been affected by the disruption, I tried to call home, only to be greeted by a voicemail service. A voicemail service that I didn't know I had.

Turns out that the letter from Buzby was more important than I realised. Apparently, the copper phone lines were being shut down, and the mystery parcel was a device that would convert my phone to a new internet-based service. And that the reason my bill was higher than normal was that they had very kindly charged me for the device. Good old Buzby.

Do you recall anybody being asked whether they wanted all that? According to the BT website, I will 'be able to stream 8k TV or ultra HD on multiple devices all at the same time without buffering or interruptions'. But given that these days I only watch the news on ITV, this seems little by the way of compensation.

What the episode did teach me was how little I really need the phone line I pay £50 a month not to use. I've no idea how many weeks it had been down for, because I never noticed the difference.

And actually, it's still not working. I never did get round to connecting the electronic device which is still in its box, and still lying in the 'to do when I'm less busy' file.

Maybe that's no bad thing. Truth is, I'm a little nervous about connecting this equipment up. It's not so much the technophobia, I dare say I will eventually get the thing to work.

I've just got this horrible suspicion that the answering service I never knew I had will now be filled with two months' worth of scam phone calls.