The teeth grinding tolerance of waiting for a telephone and the Internet to be installed that I spoke of in my May Blog, is over!!
I am pleased to report that both were installed Monday despite the language barriers between Juan (Telefonica’s Peruvian telephone engineer) and me. The phone cable was connected; the Internet connected to the ADSL modem and hey presto it all worked first time.
I happily launched the May Blog and told everyone the new number and sat back relaxed and happy at last to be able to communicate once more without trekking to the town twice a week to get onto the Internet. Nor do we have to go to the dreaded locutoria to make phone calls surrounded by a multi-cultural amalgam of Latin Americans, Rumanians and several other ethnic groups all getting calls at knockdown prices while we Brits have to pay a premium price to ring the UK. It would seem that we have to pay something like 50 cents a minute to a UK number while the rest of the multitude are paying around 15 cents. I have since found small (but not very pleasant) locutoria that only charges 15 cents but that’s all in the past now.
So there I was, nice and relaxed and calm, blissful and free to phone when I want to who I want and then it all changed and the world turned upside down when our first call came. The phone rang almost as the engineer left the house and so I thought, “oh it must be Telifonica making a customer care call” (Well you never know do you!) alas it was someone speaking in Spanish and asking about somewhere called the El Hacienda (a hotel or restaurant) so I said in my very poor Spanish – “wrong number”, and that was just the beginning.
That was on Monday morning and now it’s Thursday over 40 wrong numbers later for the Hacienda, one irate telephone call to Telifonica and an ever growing, or should I say, developing, Spanish script for answering the phone each morning and early evening. It started like this;· Tiene un numero incorrecto – Lo siento.
Then progressed to;
· Tiene un numero incorrecto – Lo siento. Esto es una casa privada.
We then refined this as it was not having a great deal of effect, to;
· Tiene un numero incorrecto – Lo siento. Este no es el Hacienda. Esto es una casa privada.
A stage further the answer became;
· Por favour! – esto es una numerao privada!. Esta no es el numero para la Hacienda – Adios!!
None of this actually seemed to work as the callers continued to engage us in debates about the number, the fact that it had to be the right number or simply talked at us rapidly without a pause for breath.
Reluctantly (if you can believe that) I took more direct action in an effort to make this ordeal more relaxing, more fun and generally more entertaining for us while we waited for Telefonica to sort out the muddle.
So my new script now goes like this;
· “Hello, Secret Intelligence Service, Room 9 – Can I help you”?
or
· “Secret Intelligence Service, recruitment section – if you wish to apply for a post please press 1 after the tone – Beeeep”
Or
· “This is the Vatican, may I help you”?
I have to report that apart from the entertainment value for us this had little effect on the number of calls. However, I was considering more inventive and mysterious scripts and was going to ask you to submit ideas or what else I could say. Happily though and by pure chance I decided to phone my mobile so that I could add the new home number to it and guess what? The number had been changed and I can only assume that during one of my verbal escapades Telefonica had called only to be greeted by a lunatic claiming to be a secret agent or the Pope!
I have now sent the new number to everyone on my list of friends and family and pray that at 9:15am tomorrow I don’t start another round of wrong numbers.
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