The weather has really perked up now, to the point where I got the sun beds out on the roof today. The combination of the sun and the largest sandwich you ever did see for lunch (no beer involved, too early in the day for me), and I fell asleep for an hour or so, I am now glowing a bit. I will need to be a little more careful for the next few days, at least I’ve tested the sun beds for when the next visit happens, which is looking like in about two weeks time, when our other daughter Lisa ‘drops by’.
Battle has recommenced with the thing in the kitchen posing as an oven. One of my purchases on the market was some nice looking red peppers, which I had decided to stuff with rice and few other things. I think I have finally mastered the beast, they came out done to a turn, along with some experimental flat bread, with could have used the garlic butter I forgot to make. Even Linda managed to eat most of one, despite not being a pepper person. They are so much sweeter than those back in the UK, and much larger, to the point that I struggled to eat two myself, despite having a love of peppers and a healthy appetite.
I have a contract mobile phone which I bought out from the UK, the package I have includes cheap calls to the UK and has worked well in the past. But I have had a problem with cellular data; I changed my contract before I came out to include 25MB a day European data as part of the bundle, so as to avoid nasty bills. I got a text from my provider saying my data was being cut off due to having spent in excess of €50. Having already spent the best part of three hours on the phone already since coming out here sorting this, I was more than just slightly miffed. After forty minutes of being told I wasn’t listening, and that the contract I thought I was on didn’t exist and never had, a few of my fuses popped. I want to speak to you’re your supervisor or manager please was my solution. She could put me through, but she wanted to know first why. Let me see, your company has taken money from me for a service that you say does not exist, then stops me from using the service, then has the cheek to charge me again for it, what would you call that? Words like fraud and theft spring to mind. And so I get to speak to the next person up the food chain. Would you be surprised if I told you I got exactly the same story? By this time my wife has joined me on the roof, no I wasn’t going to jump, it’s the only place where we are that the signal does not disappear on a regular basis. She wants to rip the phone out of my hand and give the person on the other end some serious grief, but I hang on to the phone and carry on banging my head making the dent in the wall even bigger. She gets her phone and rings the same call centre I’m talking to. At this point I would like to point out to those people who design call centre systems that there is always an option missing. It should go something like: if you would like the idiot (sorry, call centre operative) you spoke to last time to self destruct, please press 9 now. It might prove popular, and would weed out the people who can’t do their job. I must point out I don’t mind call centres, just the people who work in them that have no idea what they are doing. She gets someone called Barry, not in the right department, but obviously does know what he is doing. He says he’ll put her through to the right department, i.e. the idiot I’ve just spoken to. After a bit of basically begging, Barry says he’ll help sort the problem. We swap phones, Linda tells the man I was speaking to he’s an idiot and cuts him off, and I start talking to Barry. All hail Barry, the god of customer services, and I’m not taking the mickey here. Within two minutes of speaking to Barry he knows what the problem is, and yes my price plan does exist, he sells them every day. Barry puts me on hold while he speaks to the idiot I first spoke to, to show them their error. No joy, they don’t understand. He then speaks to their boss, can’t get his head round it, no joy. You get where this is going. After Barry has gone about four levels up the food chain he finally finds someone who understands where the rest of them couldn’t, it seems that Barry seems to be the only person in that call centre that has any decent amount of product knowledge, all the rest wanted to do was paper over the cracks until I get back to the UK, I would then have to start all over again! It should now be sorted out over the next twenty four hours, we will see. If anyone from my service provider is reading this, the people with the little red punctuation mark as a logo, you know who you are, Barry should be running that call centre, and be earning a lot more money. I wait and see what happens, hoping that if I have to ring again, I get Barry, the customer service expert.