Battling latency and packet loss

Many years ago, I worked with a German fellow, whose name happened to be Herman, which unfortunately led to him frequently being referred to as "Herman the German," of course mainly when he was out of earshot. Anyway, Herman was a very bright guy, and possessed very good English, though he seemed to be somewhat lacking when it came to colloquial language, so he had a tendency to substitute business language in everyday situations. For example, instead of saying that someone was chatting up a woman in a bar, he would say something along the lines of, "He's performing due diligence on a possible joint venture." Maybe it was just his peculiar sense of humor.

Anyway, it can't have escaped your attention, dear reader, that I have been remiss in posting of late, and I will borrow from Herman's argot to explain that several critical functional areas of my life have been undergoing fundamental restructuring in recent weeks, inflicting high levels of packet loss and latency on my neural network. My NOC has now resolved the problem, and normal service should resume shortly. In the meantime, please enjoy this, perhaps the funniest telco story in recent history, unless of course you are a Telkom S.A. employee...