Phone update

In the excitement of several other landmark developments (at least from our humble, provincial perspective) in the last month, it somehow escaped the blog’s attention that a fixed phone line was installed at our house. After a long, frustrating, and fruitless relationship with Telecomm Italia – much of it chronicled here – they finally turned up and spent all of 10 minutes to (re-)connect our long-standing, plain-for-all-to-see, existing phone line. Apparently we’re going to have to fork over some €400 for their questionable effort.

Since the complex flip-switch just over a month ago, service has, I’m happy to say, been uninterrupted. We were able to sign up – stunningly without a hitch – for a long-distance plan that allows unlimited calling to Europe and North America for a mere €10 a month.

For my South African calls, I’ve signed up for a third-party, call-another-number-first service. They advertised calls to SA for €0.02 per minute, a charge which I’ve yet to see – so far, costs have been in the €0.03-5 per minute range.

Attempted comparisons with Telecom Italia tariffs to South Africa have been fraught with puzzlement and self-doubt – their website gives a creative, neatly-compartmented, and entirely incomprehensible formula which my dull brain calculates to a monumental €0.30 for every 5.5 seconds (or €3.27 per minute). Notwithstanding TI’s likely higher charges given their sparsely-populated competitive realm, it surely has to be cheaper than this. So I’m sure I’m not reading something right, an outcome I’d wager is not beyond the essence of their intent. Whatever the actual tariff – and it wouldn’t surprise me if it changed from minute to minute – I’m pretty sure it’s more than €0.05 per minute.

Consequently, I’m not about to complain. To anyone. After all, I have a working phone, one that rings, and one that gets dial tone consistently. Better to let sleeping dogs lie I reckon, lest waking them rouses a spirit of curiosity in some telecomm bureaucrat or technician that would in all likelihood weave an “unravellable” bundle of telephonic events that would render us paying for something that we don’t have, and sharing a line with our neighbours just like our friends in Paterno do.

It’s already a little peculiar to many of the locals here that our number has a San Severino Marche prefix, a town some 50km distant.

Needless to say, our telephonic adventures have other dimensions – the telephone itself, for example. Our attempts to buy one (a) without a cord and with a built-in charger, and (b) with an answering machine have so far proved as fruitless as my attempts to understand TI’s tariff structure. Italians have not embraced the answering machine culture, and they rarely (if ever) leave or listen to messages on either fixed or cell phones. Consequently there’s not much of a market for built-in answering machines, and so I suppose we shouldn’t blame the sales clerk in the store (that only sells telephone stuff) for telling us there was an answering machine when there isn’t. Or, for that matter, for selling us a cordless phone which requires its "special" rechargeable batteries to be replaced when they finally expire.

In truth, we only have ourselves to blame for not doing all the double-and-triple checks before leaving the store, or asking the questions that we didn’t know or think to ask. (In truth, I’ve managed to stay out of this particular mire myself, leaving it to Maria in the interests of keeping my blood pressure at acceptable levels.)

All of this, however, matters naught, given - as I said before - that I have a working phone, one that rings, and one that gets dial tone consistently ... even if I trip over the cord when I walk into my office.