I have a few personal habits which I feel may be distinctive to me.

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I am so happy to go up to perfect strangers and start chatting with them. I am unashamedly short which means I have to rely on the kindness of said strangers to get things from the top shelf.

And I am on the phone, all day, every day. All day. Every day. Except Wednesday this week when I discovered that Telstra, my telecommunication provider, wasn't providing.

Couldn't make calls. I mean, that's my whole life. I ring people I know, I ring people I don't know. I have my AirPods in pretty much the whole working day. Worse, I couldn't get calls. The part of my life where I call people is shared equally with me sending my phone number to experts who I hope will call me, Dear god. I had steam coming out my ears instead of fascinating chats incoming.

The great 2026 Telstra outage. Third time in 12 months. Horrific memories of the Optus outage last year, linked to multiple deaths because triple zero went down.

On Wednesday, our biggest telco blamed a software defect. Checks out. Stuff breaks all the time. Even stuff that isn't broken can play up. Usually that doesn't include stopping millions of us from contacting each other. It doesn't stop the trains. It doesn't stop us from paying for things, which we can't use until we pay for them. At 4pm on Wednesday, Telstra declared the problem solved.

That was nearly 12 hours after it started. 12 hours of not being able to do my job. 12 hours of being relieved that WhatsApp was still working. And a few hours of explaining to people my age how WhatsApp works. Plus on Thursday morning there were still problems with trains. The incredible Downdetector, which tells you what's not working and where, revealed comments from Telstra users, everywhere from Western Australia to the Whitsundays.

There are, also, problems with Liberal members of parliament. My goodness. It seems shocking to me that........

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