Tonight my Sky+ HD box decided to autonomously place itself on standby without any explanation. It then refused to allow itself to be turned back on. We switched over to Freeview and decided to google 'Sky TV outage'.
Then the router fell over depriving us of Internet access.
My brother phoned from my mother's house where he's been visiting. The Sky box there, of ancient lineage, had decided to lose most of the terrestrial channels - after behaving itself for years. My mother's iPad won't download the ITV player app as her IOS version is so old it won't even auto-update while her laptop mysteriously lost Internet access - perhaps a problem with the Wifi link though it was hard to tell over the phone.
All this with a double episode of 'Coronation Street' imminent!
Apart from turning stuff off and then back on again the humble consumer is powerless in the face of these provocations. When did these smart-stupid machines take over our lives?
Update: at least at this end the Sky box appears to have undergone an unadvertised software upgrade and has come back to life, while Internet access has been opaquely restored. I have no news at present from my mother's.
