Hiatus explanation

My home phone and internet connection was down since last Saturday. I am not allowed to operate PC for personal use at the internship place so I pretty much missed blogging these few days. I am raising this issue because German bureaucracy sometimes is so awful like back home that I seldom feel that I am in a different country.

On Saturday noon I called the help desk via mobile and the call center transferred me with multiple hops to a point where the recorded message told that due to overwhelming customer calls they are unable to attend me and I was advised to do the complaint via internet. They did not figure people can have both down. At night I could get one lady on the other side. I asked politely, "could you please send someone tomorrow?" "We don't work on Sundays" was the reply. On my request she said she will send someone soon but can't tell when they can come. On Monday we called again and there was another guy who told that according to their diagnosis the line was alright and probably our set was out of order. My wife said "but our DSL connection is also out of order". "We don't look after internet connections" was the reply. She could make them understand that there must be some fault which is blocking both the connections. On the next day after calling them they said there will be a charge if they have to send a technical person so they were waiting for the confirmation. This time we got really angry asking why they are delaying things. Finally a person arrived and the fault was fixed. Now we are waiting for the bill.

And talking about German service charges, one of my wife's colleague got a 80 euro satellite dish (with receiver) fitted with a more than 400 Euro service charge. Seem too high? But one thing is guaranteed, you can get the perfect solution with German workmanship.