We are back in the world of very iffy WIFI. Yet while I rage about technology and its horrors, the rage is very self-denigrating.
I wonder at the young people who can’t do anything without their smart phones in their hands texting while ignoring the person they are with. And me? Here I sit, unable to get onto the internet, unable to get into my blog, and those few minutes I was able to get in yesterday, I wasn’t able to download anything, and lost the connection. So I am feeling very cut off and hard done by. But really, the luddite speaks.
Honestly. To speak in a cliches if you look up Luddite in the dictionary, you will find pictures of us illustrating the definition. Really, I ask you, how hard can it be to use a cell phone, or for that matter a pay phone, to turn on a television, to pay at a toll road station. Apparently all these things are beyond our capabilities. So is getting a SIM card for my IPAD III bought for its internet capabilities when travelling, and according to the service people in Edmonton’s apple store, easy peasy….just buy the SIM card, put it in and away you go. Not necessarily so.
We are on our fourth cell phone since leaving home. That’s even worse than it sounds because we didn’t need one the eight days we were on the Queen Mary, nor did we need one the two weeks we were with Mom and Dad in Dornoch. So by the numbers, we have them for two weeks and ditch them, break them or otherwise render them useless.
Where to start? Well, the first one doesn’t really count. It’s our permanent, home based cell phone. And we knew it wouldn’t work in Europe, so we had it along to use right up until the ship sailed, so to speak.
What we didn’t know and should have guessed (but obviously didn’t) is that unlimited talk and text doesn’t really mean that. That’s what our plan gives us, North America-wide free talk and text. We thought that meant we could use it anywhere we were. So just as the ship sailed, we called Sondra to say hello, guess where we’re phoning from? I can see you all now laughing at our folly. You got it… roaming fees. Once Sondra got over her initial fear that something awful had happened and there was no emergency, we had a great chat. But it wasn’t free as we had interpreted our plan.
Once we landed in the UK, we headed out to get a European phone. We decided we were going to be needing this phone in several countries, and we wanted to do the phone set up in a country where we spoke the language so we decided to get a good phone, and further, we decided to get a smart phone — which is more than we have at home.
Lovely phone. Now which of the 17 digits do we use to phone Mom and Dad. Yes, seriously, 17 digits. From Canada. If you are dialling from the UK, you only need to dial 11 of those digits, from anywhere else in Europe, you dial 15 digits. It’s very confusing. Our system seems so easy. Dial 1 for long distance, the three digit area code and then the number. Or if you are calling outside North America, you need a country code. But the world of phone numbers changes in Europe.
So we finally got that figured out. Turns out you start with 00 which I didn’t include in the 17, 11 or 15 digit discussion. Anyway, we used this phone easily and frequently through the UK without problems. Got to Sweden, made one call, ran out of minutes on our SIM card and that was that. All was fine though, we had good internet connections, so we face timed and emailed. Sailed through Sweden, Denmark and a good part of Amsterdam, but knew we needed a phone to talk to our landlords in Bruges.
Guess what. The phone we bought in England was locked. In spite of us telling them we were travelling through several countries, they sold us a locked phone. Which meant we couldn’t simply buy time for it. We went to a couple of different phone stores including a branch of the chain that sold us our phone in the UK. We had to be in the UK to unlock the phone, so our smart phone….useless.
We bought what the CSI shows all refer to as a burner phone in Amsterdam to reach our hosts in Bruges. and that worked just fine. It died just as we tried to reach our hosts in Longues sur mer, and we connected to our landlord through the good graces of a bartender in small town France. Ken didn’t understand the entire conversation but the word “perdu” was used freqently. So she came
and got us and all was well.
Then we got to Alsace and again couldn’t reach our landlord because the phone had run out of time, and although the nice lady at the phone store in Amsterdam said all we had to do was buy a SIM card in whatever country we were in, the phone she sold us wouldn’t keep a charge so newe SIM card or not, the phone didn’t work. So we went into Ribeauville, our home town in Alsace with no phone and no way to reach our landlord. Finally found a big grocery store that sold phones, and through good luck, and good staff at the E Leclerc store (and I tell you the name of the store so you will patronize it if you go to France, they sure were good to us) we got a phone. The French won’t just sell you a phone. you have to have an address etc for security reasons, so Ken’s driver’s licence is on file with the French government.
But then we looked with bewilderment at the phone number we had, baffled by all the digits. The nice young man dialled for us, Ken spoke to the landlord, who hung up on him. The nice young man called again, spoke on our behalf and a few minutes later, with thanks to him, and to Our Lady of the Dash, we connected.
We only have one more phone call we have to make, and that is to our car lease place and heaven only knows how we are going to manage that. We don’t have an operating phone. The phone we bought in Alsace had to be registered on line to get the phone number and to pay for time, and the piece of paper with the registration info on it got lost. So we have another useless phone.
Pay phones on the street? Forget them. They don’t take cash, and they don’t take credit cards. You have to use a special card to use them, and we haven’t been able you find anyone who knows where we can buy these phone cards.
We did take the toll roads from Provence to Tuscany without any problems. Last trip when we tried them, the machines wouldn’t take our cash or our credit cards and we ended up with a huge line up of honking vehicles filled with angry gesticulating drivers and passengers behind us. And when we pushed the help button and a real live person finally came to help us, she put our 50 Euro bill into a slot in the machine (and we received 40 euros in coins for change!!!) that hadn’t been there when WE looked for it. This happened three or four times, so we were burned several times by the system and we were reluctant toll road users on this trip. Yes , we avoided them the first two months of this trip. But with ultimate success so I guess we prevailed.
And here I remain. Unable to do anything but read, stitch, knit, commune with nature, have long conversations with my husband of 45 years, listen to music, explore medieval towns and perched villages, drink fine wine, eat fine foods. What a shame. Four days into no internet, four days into not being able to send an email. Four days into occasionally receiving mail.
I laugh at my foibles and live with the Hope that the WIFI that apparently this house has will result in more than the little arrow going around in endless circles getting nowhere. That my the contents of my outbox will magically find their way into my sent box and we will once again be in touch with the world outside our beautiful Tuscan hillside.
It’s a tough old life.
P.S. On day six, we caved. We found an electronics store down the road and bought a SIM card for our IPAD. We pleaded total need — no internet connection in our rented home, and the nice people at the store did everything for us. So we travelled home with great joy, only to find that it didn’t work. We thought we needed a data package so went back in this morning, pleaded stupidity and the nice young lady fixed us up. What a relief to be able to connect to the rest of the world. Ken as in TSN withdrawal, and I was in political update withdrawal.
Even our camera caused problems…. and Ken knows his cameras. We needed a new scan disk, which we bought when buying the SIM card. All is now right with our world. Ken put it into the camera and the camera said, “Nope, not co-operating, this disk is broken or flawed.” So when we were taking the IPAD in for its second visit (well, the third actually since the first time we went in, they wouldn’t sell us a SIM card because we didn’t have our passport with us–so now my passport is on record with the Italian government, along with Ken’s drivers’ licence which is on record with the French and Dutch governments for cell phones), we showed them them message the camera was giving us. Nice people set out to replace the scan disk, then a fourth person (this time from the camera section of the store) joined the group helping us. Had we inserted this card she asked? “This card” which she held up, had been in the package with the scan disk. It was a small, perhaps half a centimetre square card that she inserted into the scan disk and suddenly, it worked a charm. Who knew? Not us obviously.
