Life in Culebrón

I had a bit of a problem with an email group the other day. I'd never seen one before and it took me a few minutes to work it out. The person who'd set up the email also put together a group on WhatsApp before mistakenly deleting themself from the group. I bacame the group administrator by random asignation. Again it took me a few minutes to work out what was going on and reinstate him. Crikey I thought. I'm getting old. Losing touch with the technology. We have a general Election on 20 December. I was listening to some pundit, presumably from a party that hadn't done well out of a newspaper poll, saying that polls were no longer a fair reflection of the voting population. His argument was that, because the pollsters telephoned people randomly on fixed phones, the sample was self selecting as only old people have fixed phones now. I bristled. That's not true I thought defensively. It's true that even I access the Internet more often from a tablet or my p...

The other day, when I would have gone to Valencia on the train if I hadn't left my phone on the kitchen table loaded with the train tickets, I did a bit of a tour around Alicante as compensation. In Fontanars de Alforins I saw a phone box and I thought I'd phone Maggie to tell her what I was up to. I didn't know her number (it's on the memory of my mobile, why bother to learn it?) but I do know the house number. The instructions on the public phone looked very complex and, when I tried to push a 1€ coin into the slot it didn't seem to want to go in, so I gave up. I read an article today that says there are twelve phone boxes in the Plaza del Sol in the very centre of Madrid. On the day the journalist checked just one of them had been used and, at that, just three times. The remaining public phones throughout Spain are due to be phased out from December 2016 unless the Government does an about face. The article said there are 25,820 phone booths left in Spain...

Movistar is a big phone company here - they have both fixed and mobile services. Their customer service number is 1004. Last week 1004 called me repeatedly but I missed or ignored every call. Sunday: a Sunday as it should be where I didn't get around to putting my contact lenses in till late evening and where I avoided proper work all day. I was too lazy even to clean the bath or hoover the floor. On the telly I watched one of those films where the busy executive realises the error of their ways at Christmas. The World becomes a better place. In between the Christmas stories I watched the ads. Something I rarely do. The Movistar people seemed to have a good offer on for those of us who have both their fixed and mobile phone packages. There were two offers and the website suggested we were eligible for both. But the Software said no to one offer. Odd that. I could have sworn we were paying for a 3Mb package but apparently not. I didn't fret. Even the poorer of the two ...

The firm we buy our Internet services from, Movistar, is the most expensive broadband provider in the whole of the European Union. Movistar charge over 70% more for midspeed broadband access (2mgb to 10mgb) than the average price of the other old state monopolies across the European Union. The average is 34€ and Movistar charge 58€ Even the cheapest broadband access in Spain comes out nearly 11% more expensive than the median of the other European offers. So your average European pays 29€ whilst the most savvy Spaniard pays 32€. Goodness knows how much the difference is between the best European offer and what we pay. Spaniards get overcharged even more on the over 10mgb lines where the cheapest Spanish is 35€ against 30€ European average - over 16% difference. Apparently one of the big variations is that most of the headline prices on the various Spanish offers do not include the line rental as part of the package. Just in case you think we are particularly stupid in paying ...

So we were reconnected. We were back in touch but the speed was running at less than 1mb. Slow. Youtube videos stalling, 10 minutes to download the Archers podcast (I know, I know but some people can't let go of pork pies) and longer to upload snaps to Picassa. The thing is we were on the Internet here before and we had 3mb. When the engineers put in the line they were optimistic about the speed we may be able to achieve. So I phoned Telefonica. The line to customer services was as crackly as that cowboy who wore a brown paper waistcoat, brown paper shirt and brown paper trousers - the one who was arrested for rustling. Nonetheless the South American customer services person didn't give up on me. "Can we have something faster?" I asked. "You can have 3mb" she finally answered after a very creditable 14 minutes on the phone. "It will take about 8 days" she said and we left each other as firm friends. We have 3mb today. Incredible really. We aske...

"Hello, this is Telefonica, we're down by the bar in Culebrón, can you come and fetch us?" So finally, after nearly seven weeks of waiting we have the phone and Internet back. We had all the cables and what not still in place so we'd expected nothing more than someone tapping something into a computer at the exchange but the engineers spent ages up and down ladders on some nearby properties and then had to restring a cable from the telegraph pole. But who cares? We're back in touch.

I'm sitting in the Parador in Ceuta. I have views over the Strait of Gibraltar. We are about 650kms from home. We have been waiting for Telefonica to install a phone line since late June and the engineer rang about ten minutes ago to say he was on his way. I didn't tell him we weren't there. I rang our neighbour to see if he could let the engineer in. He wasn't keen, I could tell, but sterling chap that he is he said he would. Who knows we may have a phone line by the time we get back to Europe.

"But you don't have a proper address," "What?" "You don't have a proper address so we've cancelled your order!" That was the drift of a conversation with the phone company when I checked again today why we are still without either phone or Internet. So I made another order. Five minutes ago the local phone engineer rang my mobile - "About this phone to install in Calle Garcia," "We're not in Calle Garcia, we're in Culebrón, number 5, near the goats" "Then you can't have what you've ordered, you can't have 6Mgb in Culebrón, you can only have 1Mgb" "Fine, that'll do." A voice cut into the conversation, presumably from Telefonica Central, "OK, we can modify the order."OK, bye." And the line went dead. Is there a Telefonica van headed our way, will we still get the special offer price.

I spoke too soon about Telefonica. We've ordered a new phone line and Internet. The engineer phoned the day after the order and I wrote my defence of Telefonica over on Life In Ciudad Rodrigo . The engineer phoned again the day of our journey over here from Salamanca. I had to put him off of course and I rather lost the drift of the conversation but he seemed a bit concerned that we were in a village rather than, as he he had presumed, in the town. He hasn't phoned since we've been back and all we can get from Telefonica's customer services is that, in line with the contract, they will provide the line within 30 days. Cutting edge technology then? Maggie needs a medical certificate for work. We bought the form from a tobacconist . All she needed was a doctor to fill it in. She rang for an appointment but, because she signed on to the Castilla y Leon health care system she had to go into Pinoso to sign back on to the Valencia system. Luckily it was Thursday. It's o...