London Calling

It's been about 30 years since I last visited London. I've been to Newcastle a few times, but avoided being in London. But this year my family (including princesses who are rapidly turning into teenagers) decided to "do" England and Ireland, so we are meeting in London. I'm here a few days earlier with WiseMan in order to do some vacationing ourselves.

The first thing you notice about London is that everyone seems to have earphones on, and half of the people are talking loudly into their shoulders. And I mean LOUDLY. I'd be rich if I wrote a novel about every drama I've half heard just the past few days. And they are addicted to their phones! Even a proper English professor I was meeting for dinner took a "Selfie" with me and sent it on to a friend, sharing the immediate response with me, as we discovered that I had just recently been in correspondence with just this friend.

From the ads I gather that mobile phones are incredibly cheap to use, 10 pounds buys 700 minutes a month and 5000 (!) SMS and 500 MB of data. In Germany you would pay three times that.

I observed one woman at a bus stop, hair set in stone with hairspray, dressed in a very close-fitting black leather top and mini-skirt, with a shopping bag in one hand and a small box with a slice of pizza in the other, yakking away on her phone. She had the phone, a non-smartphone, held tight with her bra strap pulled out a bit from her shoulder. As she boarded the bus, it turned out that she even had two kids in tow. The bus driver called her back to user her bus card to pay for the trip - she had to give the pizza box to her little boy while she got out the card, while continuing to talk on the phone.

Don't Call Back!

We have canceled our telephone here in Sweden, I now have 3G Internet access, and we have mobile phones, no need to spend 400 crowns a quarter just so people can call us. We now have two pre-paid Swedish phones, a Telia and a Tele2, the latter has a great deal for calls to Germany.

We turned on both phones - and the Tele2 has been ringing off the hook. Every few minutes we get a call from +25 21 592 8331. Since Germany is +49, and I was on the Internet, I looked up the international code for 25. There is none. So I took in the next digit, and 252 is a country - Somalia.

Now, I don't know a lot of people in Somalia (I had a student from there once), so I googled a bit. It seems that Somalia has this deal for you to pay for something by calling a number. And some clever people just dial numbers at random, hoping for a call back to their number, which costs around 20$ a minute!

We had 7 calls a few hours ago, then it quieted down, there have been 2 more while I write this.

Where is the "junk" button when you need it? I want my phone to ignore calls from this number, or any number from Somalia.

T-inCOMpetent

I always dread having to change anything having to do with our telecommunications infrastructure, as for some reason normally well-organized Germans manage to screw things up *every* *single* *time*.

But the teenager will be back in house and since his current girlfriend is a long-distance call away, I think a flat-rate would be a good investment. I went to their web site to check the prices and maybe book the Germany + local flat rate.

The web site was impenetrable. It is full of flashy pictures and Great Deals that come with Wee Tiny Footnotes explaining that after the honeymoon period everything will cost twice as much. They offered me movie flat rates and really fast DSL (tempting, my current provider, 1&1, slogs along at "up to 1 Mbit/second" which really means "maybe 200 Kbit/second if we feel like it and 19 if you are downloading anything important") and telephones and all sorts of gadgets. But where could I book an upgrade? Why is it so difficult buying something simple?

So I called the free number and spoke with a lady. She was reading from a script sheet and had trouble pronouncing things. She said something like "mirwersteuer" and when I asked what that was she started reeling of the definition of value-added tax. Ah, Mehrwertsteuer. Now I wanted to know what the difference beforetax was to what I pay now, as the bill only adds the tax in at the end. When I finally figured out that it was 10 Euros a month, I said "Fine, please book that for me from August 12."

Yesterday I got the confirmation in the mail. 60 Euros surcharge for a tariff change! And the change will be effective July 20.

So I called the toll-free number again this morning, and this lady had a look. "Hmm," she said, "you changed from ISDN back to analog, did you?" I did no such thing, I'm not crazy, none of my phones and my DSL from another provider would not work! "Good thing you called, yes, this is just an additional service and not a change of tariff. I'll fix this and send you another confirmation."

Maybe T-Com should invest a few Euros in actually training their people. Stupid stuff like this costs us both money.

I suppose I'll end up with a movie flat rate on the next confirmation....