Your next service is due at 20mb

I was a little surprised to receive an email from BT today announcing some sort of training scheme, as my learning days are long past me and they really ought to know that, but I let my eyes slip down the first paragraph until they stopped, inevitably at the bit marked in bold.

We've launched Skills for Tomorrow, a free digital skills programme to help you and 10 million people across the UK go beyond limits and reach their full potential. We've teamed up with amazing partners, like LinkedIn Learning and Google Digital Garage...

 There was quite a lot more but I am afraid I was unable to proceed any further.


Scene: The Ruislip Digital Garage, in the back alley near Abattoir Road. A young woman, clutching a printout, enters nervously. A man in overalls emerges from the office, tucking his fag behind his ear.

Man: "Morning, darling, what can I do for you?"
Woman: "It's this code. There's something wrong, it doesn't run at all smoothly. Can you take a look at it?"
M: "Let's see here." sucks teeth "Umm, yeah, cor, who wrote this subroutine then? See that incomplete tag? And that function's been deprecated, yeah, must be version 2.4 and you should be on 3.9 by now."
W:  " Oh dear, that doesn't sound too good, but it normally works fine. "
M:  "Have your code regularly checked, do you, love?"
W:  "My husband usually has a look but he's been too busy lately. I did try putting in a recurring do-while loop here but it throws out an exception error in line 220"
M:  "Yeah, bound to do that, this is one of the problems with version 2.4 you see, cor, we get loads of them in here. Don't worry, we'll knock up a few quick algorithms, swap out the reference library for a new one and clean up those REMs while we're at it. Should have it working by next Tuesday"
W:  " That's wonderful. Will be it very expensive?"
M:  "Well, let's see, update version, new lib, algo swap out, a few test runs on the sandbox ... about a hundred and fifty, alright?"
W:   "Thank you so much. I'll leave it with you then"
M:   "Yeah, ta, see you later." She goes.  He has a draw on his fag and chucks the printout into the pending tray "Another one. Money for old rope, this lark"