Friday, September 12, 2008

Oh, Larry, how I've missed you.

I feel as though I'm caught up with the news, just a little bit though. I found out last night that if I moved the TV upstairs, that we're still getting cable from the last tenant! This is both a good thing and bad thing. The good thing is that we now have 7 channels instead of 2 1/2. The other good thing is that we now get one channel in English, CNN. So, I got to watch Larry King Live last night, and boy was I excited. I've never once watched Larry in the States, but it was nice just to hear about the campaign, even if the whole show was just about Obama's lipstick on a pig comment. The bad thing is the fact that we still have cable means that our cable/internet is still not hooked up!

This was actually a pretty good story this week. So, there's this guy Tom that helped us move in and has lived here for 18 years. He's in charge of helping the new teachers when they move here for the first year, among other things. So, he's been calling this guy from Telmex (the internet/cable provider) every day for the past month, asking him when the other contract from the previous tenant can be cancelled and ours can begin. He's been told every time that it should be another 2-3 days. So, he asked the guy this week if there was any way to make this go a little faster. The guy told him to go talk to the people at the Telmex office across the street. So, after school on Tuesday, Tom, my roommate Tara, and I went to these offices. We walked in and the security guy and lady at the front desk told Tom that we couldn't speak to anyone about our situation, that it was only corporate offices there. The lady was pretty rude, so Tom told her that she should work on her dealings with the public and then turned around and was swearing in English all the way out. That's the way Tom is. He's loud. That's also why Tara and I decided to ask for his help. So, they sent us to this other tiny office in some neighborhood about 10 minutes away. This "office" was off a main street, had bars in front, and a few ladies working inside. No doors, by the way, you have to talk to people through the prison-like bars. So, Tom relayed our story to this lady, who said that nothing like this had ever happened before and that the original guy who signed us up wasn't doing his job. We put the two of them on the phone together to see if they could figure it out because didn't our teachers always tell us that "two heads are better than one?" Well, not in this case. The woman basically put the ball back in the original incompetent guy's hands...and he told us, yes, you guessed it, to wait 2-3 more days. When we asked for her number so that we could call her for the status of our account, she told us that she didn't have a work phone number, even thought there was a phone in plain sight right next to her on her desk. Strange. So, we went back to the original idiot and tried to see if he would tell us something different if perhaps it was in person. Tom, who towers over this man, still only got our standard reply. The best part of the whole debacle was that when Tom asked the guy if he could change one thing on his own Telmex account, the guy was more than willing to help him out. So, he directed Tom over to this phone hooked up to the kiosk and when Tom picked up the receiver, it was unplugged and the guy was scrambling to plug it in. So, the TELmex company seems to have a bit of an issue getting phones hooked up for it's employees, which is probably part of the reason why we still don't have the internet or cable.

I'm not sure what I learned from this, but I just keep hearing what Tom is always saying to the new teachers, "I'm amazed anything in Colombia works."

Although I still don't have the internet or real cable at home, I do have CNN, so that's at least something. Something I never thought I'd be excited about, but still something.

3 comments:

CEZ said...

Wow,I might just start watching larry King myself.

Amy said...

I'm curious about the 1/2 channel...

Unknown said...

I'm also wondering about the half channel?? Hopefully 2 or 3 days comes more quickly next week than it has over the last month.