Sometimes this country really makes me want to break
stuff.
A quick word on the German telephone company Deutsch Telecom (DT for
short): This company has, by far, singlehandedly pissed me off more than
anything else during my entire time here. I have phone
cards that have worked all over Europe, and yet as soon as I try to use
them in a DT phone, I get, "You can't connect to this number from here."
Couple that with the fact that the DT phone cards have the awesome rate of
about 1eu per minute, ($1.24 right now), and that the biggest card
usable in their phones is only 10eu (so 10 mins of conversation), and I'm
sure some of my frustration is understandable.
The thing is, everytime I see one of those pink handsets, all I want to do
is rip it out of the wall, and gestapo stomp it into the nether-regions of
one or more of the DT high-level executives. Maybe, after having the
broken shards of plastic surgically removed piece by pink piece, the
person might understand a small part of the mental anguish that this
company has inflicted on me. Moving on...
Last Friday, I went to Dresden for a day. We got up early even
though we had only the day before returned from our crazy 26-day-long
excursion. The train left at 8:36, and got us into Dresden at about
10:20. The goal: Find the international office, and get ourselves started
with whatever we could before having to move everything to Dresden
the following Monday. (tomorrow)
We found the office easy enough, and talked to the lady that we thought to
be in charge of the details of our time in Dresden. We came to find out
that she didn't really handle the things that we could accomplish that
day, and that the most we could do would be to try and talk to the housing
people about getting our rooms closer to being ready for us.
We walked to the housing building, and that's where the trouble began. In
this building resides a secretary on a power trip. We tried to speak to
her for a minute, but rather than hear our less-than-perfect German, she
just tossed a card with times on it at us, as if it say, "This
conversation... is over."
We didn't really know what was going on, but got the idea that the lady we
were there to see was in the building, but that we couldn't talk to her,
because she didn't have Friday "Speaking Hours." I was under the
impression that the first lady from the International Office had already
called down and got us cleared, so I went back to the secretary to try
again. She gave me a look of death and said, "What was unclear
about what I gave you." This is where I went off.
Let me say one thing about speaking a scary sounding language like German.
When you go off on a person, get forcefull, and don't accept immediately
what that person has to say, it's friggin scary. I tried to explain
what was going on, and she just continued to be completely unsympathetic,
unhelpful, and uncaring. At this point, thinking that we already had
clearance to speak with the woman behind the doors, I said, "Give me your
phone number." She started writing the other lady's number, and I was
like, "No, YOUR phone number. I'll have somebody who can explain this to
you call, as you obviously are too much of a preprogrammed east-german
robot to listen to a word I have to say."
She backed off a little when she realized I was a persistant ass, and
wasn't going to let my progress be stopped by a desk-jockey with an
attitude. She then proceeded to call the lady we were
there to see, to find out if we were really expected as we had said.
Well, it turns out that the international office lady hadn't called ahead,
and had suspected that we might run into this problem, but failed to
mention that fact to us. The lady in the housing department said, "No,
it's Friday, piss off..." and that was that.
We went back to the international office, and the lady there was like,
"Oh, yeah, I thought that might happen. You'll just have to come back
and do it all on Monday." I was steaming, but didn't show it. The trip
was nearly worthless, as we accomplished nothing, and I had to get up
early. I say nearly, only because I learned one important thing... Even
if I can't beat a person that pisses me off with the receiver of a DT
payphone, at least I can produce a similar blugeoning effect by yelling in
German. Peace out.
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