June 25, 2007

Things to do today are: call to BT, a water company and an electricity company.

I’m good at dealing with this kind of work in Japan. I could finish these three calls within 30 minutes, but here, I started at 9:40am and finished at 3:00pm. Actually it’s not finished yet. Everything takes much longer time than I estimate. Just making three calls takes such long time.

First of all, I started to call BT. My first priority is Internet access. Now there’s neither telephone line nor ADSL. So, I have to use my cell phone to call BT. They have a free call number, but the announcement said it requires normal charge from cell phone. Anyway I had no choice and waited someone picking up my call. The automatic voice message kept telling me “Sorry to keep waiting. Our line is very busy”. After 5 minutes wait, a person picked up my call. I said “I’d like to use telephone line and broadband service”. He said, “Do you want to use telephone line and broad band service?” I said “yes”. “I’ll connect this line to the section for telephone and broadband. Would you wait for a second?” I had no choice to say “yes”. Again I needed to wait under automatic voice message. After a while, I heard “1 minute remaining” warning from my cell phone. Does BT cost me during my waiting time? My first airtime is 10 pounds (2,400 yen), and this is the first call from my cell phone. Before I finish my calculation about the telephone fee, the line was cut off. And I was at home with no charged cell phone. The first 10 pounds charge helped me know only that I called a different section of BT. What a waste of time and money…

Anyway I have to re-charge my cell phone I have two more offices to call. By the way, how much money do I need to re-charge for finishing all three procedures? With 10 pounds, I didn’t even start the procedures.

I went out for re-charging and decided to use BT public phone. Then I can use free call. Telephone box isn’t comfortable, but it’s better than wasting my cell phone airtime. I have to repeat the same procedure again and I kept waiting under automatic voice message. Finally I reached an adviser. She was very kind. I’d already checked my broadband plan, so all the procedures finished. If I didn’t misunderstand, my broadband will be activated on the next Monday. It’s earlier than I expected. However, I doubt it a bit, because of the fact that a maintenance person is scheduled to come to check my place today but he’s not come yet. Even if the broadband engineer doesn’t come on next Monday, I shouldn’t be disappointed.

Two other calls to water and electricity companies, they have other problems. I’ll describe about this after solving the problems. Now that I use water and electricity without a problem, it’s not urgent so far.