Promise vs. reality

Today my mother and I went to the local shopping centre to run some errands. First we visited a shop for her landline and cable provider, as I was interested in adding internet to her package, with an eye on me coming to visit more often in the future. I was hopeful that this would be easy, as she was sent a brand-new modem only the other week, which does have wi-fi capacity and everything; it's just not unlocked.

First the guy told us that he couldn't just "add" internet, we would have to be changed to a whole new bundle deal. Fine, I thought. And no, we couldn't keep the current modem, in fact we'd need two new boxes installed. With an activation fee. And a monthly rent. And my Mum would need a new landline number. That's where I kind of went "come on", because I couldn't believe that simply amending an existing contract would require a new landline number. The guy called up some higher-level support, chatted with them for about ten minutes, and then told us that we'd need to go to their HQ in another disctrict.

So we left without having achieved anything. I was really hoping that this would be doable, and I was in fact willing to overpay quite a bit (since I won't actually be here to use the internet every month), just for the convenience of not having to deal with on-and-off mobile solutions whenever I'm in Austria, but this is just too ridiculous. I can't do that to my mother.

Then we went to an electronics store to submit some old slides of my Dad's for digitalisation. Their website advertised that this was going to be done directly in store and really fast, with most orders being ready for pick-up on the same day. We had a lot of slides though, so I fully expected the process to take longer than that, maybe a few days. What I didn't expect was them saying that it would be at least a month - meaning that by the time they'll be ready, I'll be back in the UK and it'll fall to my Mum to pick everything up. I mean, we're still getting it done, but this is pretty close to false advertising in my opinion. A pretty disappointing trip, all in all.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Crunch time

I work in what can only be described as a pretty cushy office job. Since the pandemic I only need to actually be in the office once or twice a week; the rest of the time I can work from home. The job is engaging but generally not hard - since I've been performing similar kinds of tasks for several years now, I'm pretty good and efficient at them. My co-workers are all a lovely bunch. And my employer is pretty decent, as far as evil global megacorporations go. However, earlier in the year they decided that our e-commerce website would move to a new platform. This doesn't have any immediate benefit to us as the people managing it, nor to our customers - if anything, there are quite a few downsides at least in the short term. Mainly the project seems to be something to satisfy bean counters and higher-ups who want to save money by having more brands run on the same kind of software, that kind of thing. It's not the most inspiring goal, but understandable. What was less und
Read more

None of these

Image
I finally opened my mail-in ballot for the upcoming Austrian national election today and actually had a laugh-out-loud moment when I finished fully unfolding it. You see, the final of the eleven options states: "Keine von denen - KEINE", which means "none of these - NONE", so my first thought was: Wait, did they add an "official" way to spoil your ballot if you want to take part in the democratic process but don't like any of the available choices? But no, it's an actual political party. Their whole thing is that they do say they don't feel represented by any of the current parties, so I guess their mission statement is in the name... but it does seem like a bit of a legal loophole and like they could potentially get a good chunk of votes simply out of confusion. Very Austrian, is all I'll say.
Read more

My first ex-boyfriend

I have this (occasionally) re-occurring dream about my first boyfriend. In it, I go to visit him for some reason (he lives in the Netherlands) and we're really friendly and get along great... as if we'd remained friends over the last twenty years instead of breaking up and never speaking again (which is what actually happened). Sometimes I may even end up getting flirty in this dream and express an interest in getting back together... though around this point a part of my subconscious usually seems to raise the alarm that something isn't quite right with this scenario and throws some kind of curveball into the mix - in the case of last night's dream, this meant me finding out that he's actually married and has a six-month-old baby. The latter was funny to me upon waking up in so far as I could tell exactly what piece of real life news my brain had pulled inspiration from for that one. As far as I can tell from my ex's public Facebook profile, he's not actu
Read more