Entre Les Murs

New Phone

With more satisfaction than the accomplishment reasonably warrants, I was able to get a new telephone installed. I called France Telecom on Wednesday and spent an hour (well, that's certainly what it felt like) with a very patient M. Darwin, trying to speak and understand French on a very crackly connection.

As an aside, I am pleased that customer service here doesn't tell you "This is Todd how can I help you today, Miles?". Call me a throwback but if I introduce myself to a stranger on the phone by my full name, I want to be addressed with a "Mister", and I am happy to return the courtesy.

The call got off to a choppy start, since the second question M. Darwin asked was who were the previous occupants of the apartment (the first was what is my name; the answer being something the French often have trouble with - thank heavens for Miles Davis, allusion to whom tends to turn the lightbulb on). A logical question, once you think about it, but I hadn't, and I couldn't recall it. It had been on the mailbox when we moved in, so I was able to get as far as "it starts with an 'H' and is really short..." but no further. Fortunately that was enough, and we could proceed. Most of the time was taken by providing bank account numbers, credit card numbers, and the usual bumf required by any French bureaucracy; it could have been worse, since they took all the information over the phone and didn't ask anything about my carte de sejour, which hasn't arrived yet.

And then, since we need the full suite, there was the discussion of the high-speed internet options, the television channel package, and so on. And after all that, M. Darwin had to call back because the configuration I'd requested wasn't a possible package, and I'd given him the wrong bank information. All quite a workout for my tortured French, one I'm not sure I would have been up to a few months ago.

Sarcastic comments about French bureaucracy are perhaps a little out of line here, because the whole thing was arranged efficiently over the phone, the information they requested was all quite reasonable, mistakes (mine) were corrected quickly, and the very next morning there was a text message on my mobile announcing that the line was operational.

Unfortunately, there was no dial tone. I checked periodically all day, dreading another call to customer service, where I was not likely to get someone as patient as M. Darwin a second time. This morning I checked again, and still no tone. But then I remembered the dictum that has served me well at work (if I remember it) when a computer is not behaving: first, check the cables. The line into the phone was not seated correctly. One little poke, and I had my dial tone.

posted 17.2.06