Quick to get technician out. Hope it doesn't turn out like last time.
On Friday at around 12 in the afternoon my internet suddenly went dead. I reported the problem to my service provider (Afrihost - amazing company) who then reported it to Telkom. I got a reference number for the fault. Today a woman arrived at around 16:00 to find out what the problem was. She went to my local box to find that the cable has been damaged by an crew that is installing fibre in my neighbourhood. The cable has been severely damaged enough to cut off at least 3 full streets from both internet and voice line. I believe that the fibre installation crew is with Openserve which is in turn with Telkom. How incompetent is this crew that they're able to so severely damage a cable that it cuts off hundreds of homes from internet and voice service? Goodness gracious. I really feel like this shouldn't be a problem. Your digging crew of uns****ed labourers has done how many thousands of rands of damages just by accidentally putting a spade through some cable. Incredibly unprofessional.

So, there's nothing I can do about that. A contractor will be hired to undo the tens of thousands of rands worth of damage caused by the digging crew. 

The problem I am most worried about is what happened last time something like this happened. We had cable stolen a couple years ago that also cut off the same grouping of houses. It took about a week to install new cable. That was fine. What wasn't fine though is that it took an additional 10 days on top of that just to get the correct number associated with my house again. The cable was installed and the voice line worked and the DSL synced, but the number I had actually belonged to another guy on my block and it took another 10 days for me to get my number back after having the cable installed. 

I don't want the same thing to happen again Telkom. If the same thing happens again I will be absolutely furious. Waiting for the contractor to repair cable theft, that's fine. I can deal with that - just pure bad luck. Waiting an additional 10 days just for Telkom to give me back the same phone number. That's just unprofessional. Please don't repeat the same mistake, Telkom. I want to believe that you can actually learn from your experiences.