Whilst waiting, I busied myself with a some shopping tasks in town, had a brief meet-up with Sian from Life on a Small Island (over a pot of tea), and then busied myself with office work through the screen of my mobile phone. I contacted the service provider, who looked at the stats and reckoned that everything had been working normally, until both systems suddenly went off line late on the previous evening. The inference was that there had been a power outage.
I was fairly certain that, if that had been the case, the customer would've mentioned it during our phone call, so lack of electricity was removed as a suspect.
I mulled and mused, pondered and postulated, but all I could think of were two very unlikely scenarios:
1. Dish 1, the older of the two installations, had become detached from its mounting and bludgeoned into Dish 2, rendering them both unserviceable;
2. A windblown sheet of wet silage wrap had become entangled around both dishes, blocking the signal.
But for either of these scenarios to be remotely feasible, there would need to have been much more meteorology experienced on the night in question. So what the heck could be causing two separate properties, with dishes co-located side by side, to have the same fault at the same time?
As you can see, the dishes are mounted low down and sheltered by a wall, to give them some respite from the westerlies which come roaring in off the unforgiving Atlantic Ocean.
By late afternoon, when I finally managed to visit the site, the customer had figured out the cause, just leaving me the simple task of dish re-alignment. The previous day, eight male sheep had escaped from a nearby field, chomped their way through several gardens' worth of Daffodils and blundered by the broadband dishes. What the actual flock?!
How was that not on my list of possibilities?
