Last night the phone rang. Why am I
mentioning this? No, it was not one of those nightly calls by a family member
telling you some horrible news like “Granddad had a heart attack” or “There has
been a terrible accident”. Luckily it was just some telemarketer who really
picked a very bad time to go about his business.
No, I mention it because until this
moment we hadn’t had a phone connection for 3 months. We had tried to solve the
problem several times, but so far without success. We had called the phone
company to get someone to fix the problem when we noticed that the phone wasn’t
working. Well, actually a friend of ours who had a bone to pick with Telekom
offered to help us and take care of it.
What you normally do here in Argentina
is you call in the fault and the service department registers it and gives you
a number. They have then 72 hours to react and send someone over. Since this
timeline seems to be a bit of challenge it is usually impossible to get
through. Our friend – we still owe him a big, big drink for that – actually had
to go to one of the stores in person to file the issue. And guess what? He
still couldn’t talk to a real person put had to enter a little booth with a
phone where he could call in the problem. I find this system very bizarre but
perhaps life as a face-to-face Telekom Customer Agent is way too dangerous in
this country. Well, at least this way someone picked up.
A few days later, a technician from Telekom
came over to our house. He checked the main socket, declared it functional and
explained that the other thick grey cable (probably from an alarm system)
seemed to be interfering with the Telekom cable. We should talk to our landlord
and have a general electrician fix the problem.
We didn’t know anything about an alarm
system that must have been installed and used by the former tenant. So we
called our landlord who admitted, that yes, he had a private telephone system set
up when he was living in the house - which explained the multiple cables in the
wall. He gave us the number of the company that had installed it, we fixed a
date and the technician came over. He checked the line and all the sockets in
the house and guess what? The Telekom guy had given me bull since the socket he
had checked and the phone line was pretty much dead.
So we were back to square one again.
This time we delegated the complaint filing and all the dealings with Telekom
to our landlord. Our connection is still registered to his name and sort of
came with the house – so we decided to make it his problem. With Skype being
our main communication channel with family and friends abroad and our mobiles
serving as a good alternative for calls within Buenos Aires, we hadn’t been
using the phone much anyway. It would have been nice, though, to have a
landline in case of one of the frequent power cuts or breakdowns of the mobile
net – and we were paying for the bloody thing! So we told our landlord to fix
it.
He managed to register the fault but the
72 hours went by without anyone getting back to us with an appointment. And
that was more or less the Status Quo until yesterday. So imagine our surprise
when the phone rang last night. Just like that, the connection was working
again. Me being a sceptic - and a German to boot – I keep asking myself “How
did it happen”, “What was wrong with it” and “Will it last”? But I don’t see
any easy way to get an answer to those questions so perhaps I should just lean
back, be happy about this magical recovery and focus my energy on other
issues.
Like for example the water shortage we
are having at the moment ... Due to power failures in the capital and some
areas in the province of Buenos Aires the water pressure is too low and our
water tanks on the roof are running empty.
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