Gran Can calling

As I will be a homebody looking after Baby C I have insisted we should have a phone line installed at home. That way I can play on the t’interweb all day, because Baby C will, of course, be an angel and snooze all day in a set routine from the first.

I looked around at various offers and talked to some friends and decided the best bet was to go with Telefonica for both the line and the internet provision. This way if there is a problem with either then you are only dealing with one company, instead of two who can insist that the problem is with the other.
I also thought it would be easier as we don’t have a line installed at home as yet, though there is a phone plug.

When am I ever going to learn about thinking that things will be “easy” or “easier” in a Gran Can life?

We signed up with Telefonica in English, a company that sign you up and pass you on to Telefonica for installation and all. This way at least we understand the contract we are getting.
My first mistake was entering our address as the address on our rental contract, because you would expect the address on your rental contract to be the address that you live at. Nope.
For some reason the landlord or the agency had made a mistake and given our address as the street that the other side or our block is on, maybe because that is the landlord’s address, who knows. Mr. C had worked this out but I had not until I was driving along the other street and realised that there were two number 64’s if the address on our contract was correct. Fortunately Mr. C managed to sort out the correct address for the phone company, but not before having a ‘lil grump at me, but you can see how I could make the mistake.

Correct address given, we were waiting for the technician to contact us which he did in the given time so we were hopeful of a smooth installation. He came along poked around at our phone plug and told us that we couldn’t have a line as the bit of line connected to the plug was not connected to the external line.
Well that’s easy to remedy, you just run a line from our apartment to the external line.

Can you guess what’s coming next? Can you? No, of course it wasn’t that simple.

The main external supply line ends about ten metres up from our block on the street facing the outside of our block. Three years ago our installation chappie had to run a cable from the external line to the apartment, but had made the mistake of not asking permission from the homeowner on the corner of the block whose wall he ran the cable along. The homeowner took the cable off and made a denuncia against the technician and still refuses to allow the single, white, telephone cable along his wall that would mean that we could get connected to the outside world.

The only other option is to go through the buildings drilling big holes through everyone’s walls, just what you want to do to make yourself popular with your new neighbours. Fortunately we managed to contact our landlord whose family live in the apartments behind and above us and they were willing to allow a connection from their telephone line to us. However, with not quite enough line to connect from them to us we have to have a second technician come out to install the extra line and our original chappie come back another time to connect the phone and t’interweb.

I did feel sorry for the our installation chappie as he explained to Mr. C that as a contractor to Telefonica he doesn’t get paid until our installation is complete, so he worked for a couple of hours for nothing. Fingers crossed we will be connected in a week or so.