Call for help

So the explanation was a simple one, as given when we found a member of the militia lurking in the yard making polite enquiries as to whether our phone was working. He was not to know that seconds prior to our encounter I was wracking my brain for explanations as to why this essential piece of technology had failed us, along with our link to cyberspace. He was not to know that I had emptied the contents of the great drawer, the drawer that contains all things including old phone bills in the hope that I would be organised enough to have "filed" it when it was paid. The explanation for our inability to contact the outside world was a big yellow digger which was now parked guiltily under the trees after severing the phone line.
After accepting his profuse apologies we waited for developments.
In the ideal world a van load of technicians would appear, disembark and repair said line with the minimum of fuss.
I reality it led to three very tortured phone calls to some less than helpful inhabitants of a call centre in a country far far away who singularly failed to understand the concept of "digger" and "cut line". So keen were they to stick to the script to which they had been trained, any attempt at my deviation from the required responses led to utter confusion.
Could I remove the front plate off the phone socket and see if there was anything wrong, well I could mate but theres a digger five hundred yards away and its cut the line, whats the point?
Could I just plug the phone in the test socket, why, so we can test the phone line, mate theres a huge yellow digger with a very sheepish owner over the fields and hes cut the line, the test will not work.
Is it plugged in the socket now?
Yes.
Do you have dial tone?
No which is no surprise as the aforementioned digger has not put the line back together.

Right we shall test the line, that will tell us where the fault is.
Its by the digger.
The line test shows its fine and the fault is within your home.
No, your test is wrong, reason being a digger has cut the line. We can come and fix it but you need to assure us that we will be paid when we find the fault in your home.
Mate, you can have my house if that's the case, its not working as a digger has cut the line.
Right as we have your assurance that you will pay we will send an engineer in three working days.
No!
And we did this three pointless times in an effort to get things resolved.
Each time as pointless as the last.
Today, against all odds a van with one competent technician arrived and quickly found the fault, next to the digger, (X marks the spot)rejoined the wires and tadaah, we are back in touch with the outside world.
The answer machine yielded a few more pointless events, like BT phoning back to ask to speak to me as they believed I wished to report a fault. I would of been happy to chat with them had I been able to receive the call, but as the line they were calling on was the one under the digger, well......