but misfortune comes in all shapes and sizes.
It’s like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory,
unhappiness is a story.”

– Haruki Murakami

One of the things I forgot to tell you why I wasn’t updating my page is that I don’t have Internet access at home at the moment and though updating during my spare time is quite difficult. You might wonder why this happened, and I am glad to be able to tell you yet another amazing Telekom story.

All started about 4 weeks ago, when we decided to change the name and bank account of our contract with DT to a person actually living inside our flat. This should be (already confirmed several times by different people from DT) a quite simple task:

• Old contractor and new contractor go with their IDs to a T-Punkt
• both sign a paper stating the change of the contract to the new person
• done, a couple of days later you’ll receive a letter ant that’s it.

But far from it, this is what happened to us:

• 20th of October: Transfer of the contract as described above
• 25th of October, around 11:00: Our phone line gets disconnected without any further notice. A couple of hours later we receive a letter (our postman arrives little late some times) telling us about the new contract. For your information, a new contract is charged with 60€ connection fee.
• 25th of October, late afternoon: After several calls with the DT hotline (0800 330 1000) and the DT hotline for technical failure management (0800 330 2000) we have a time for our new phone line: tomorrow evening
• 26th of October, around 19:00: Our phone line gets connected, and we get a new phone number. We are slightly puzzled, noone told us about this. Later on we will be asked several times by the DT hotline workers why we got a new number and will finally receive an “answer”:
  This was another error by our collegues at the T-Punkt!
  But still some stuff is not working: we do not have a DSL connection anymore.
• 27th of October, 9:00-?: Several calls during the day to the above mentioned hotlines give us several reasons and solutions of our lost DSL connection:
  • Oh, sorry, this should be there, we will connect this again
  • You have a resell DSL account, you have to talk to your reseller
  • You have a resell DSL account but it was our mistake, we will solve this problem
  • You have a new phone line, if you need DSL you have to order it again
  • all these can be combined with a “we will call you as soon as we know more, we solved this, ...” We are still waiting for any of these calls
• 27th of October, 15:00: despite all these different answers, we call our Reseller (1&1) and tell them the problem. They reorder the connection for our phone line at DT. Around this time we also received an Email from 1&1 telling us that we will loose our DSL connection because of the changed number, a little late!
• 27th of October, around 17:00: Last information of the DT: This incident is now handled by the failure management and should be resolved soon.
• 30th of October, 10:00: Because we still have no DSL connection, we called again the DT hotline. We receive the same answer as before. The date for our connect is now: today.
• 30th of October, 23:30: Still no Internet connection
• 31th of October, 16:30: After several calls we get a new version how to solve our problem (you see, now it is our problem, even though DT made the mistake(s)):
  Despite all previous statements, we have to reorder DSL with our Reseller. They have to order the DSL for the new phone line.
  As you might remember, we already did that last Friday...
• 31th of October, 17:50: After numerous tries to call 1&1 - they have quite a nice hotline policy I will describe later - we manage to reorder DSL for our phone line, costs 50€. Slightly shocked, we demand an explanation:
  DT charges 100€ for a DSL connection setup, half of this is paid by 1&1 the other half by the customer. As this is now handle like we moved, we have to pay this. Nice idea of producing money: DT makes mistakes and charges for the solution.
• 2nd of November, 9:00: we call - again - the DT hotline to be sure they now received our connection setup request. They have it and they also have a setup date: 10th of November. As we complain this date because it is too late and all of this is only because of a mistake of the DT, they promise to change it to an earlier date.
• 3rd of November, late afternoon: We have a new setup date, Monday, 6th of November. To get this we had to call several times since yesterday morning. If we do not call them once in a while we still would wait for all of this (and more)
• 6th of November, 11:00: We call the DT to know about the status of our DSL connection. We receive different answers (again we called several times because every time you call you’ll get a different answer): it will be during this day, there is no request for a setup at all, the setup will be Friday, 10th of November
• 6th of November, 23:00: Our DSL router tells us that it has a working DSL connection, but the connection is not working: “DSL locked out” and “PPPoE timed out” are the error messages. We call 1&1 technical support “available 24-7” and listen to Cafe del Mar for about nearly an hour.
• 7th of November, 9:00: Next try. 1&1 tells us that even though the line is working, they still wait for the final acknowledgement from the DT to allow the usage of the line.
• 7th of November, 16:00: We finally have a contact in the BackOffice Reutlingen of the DT. It took us numerous calls to get here. We now have a personal contact with a direct phone number, no more hotlines!
• 7th of November, 18:00: Our contact calls back and gives us a current status:
  • T-Systems
  • the line was measured again and is working correctly.
  • The final acknowledgement will be sent again this evening
• 8th of November, 8:45: Our contact calls again, confirming here statements. The line is now fully functional.
• 8th of November, 9:00: Next try with 1&1. They received the acknowledgement, it could need several hours to reactivate our account.
• 8th of November, 17:45: Still no Internet. We call 1&1 again. They see the connection requests of our router, everything is fine. It might be that the server still needs to be updated, this can take at most 24 hours.
• 9th of November, 9:00: Again, still no Internet. As we know that 1&1 received the ACK for the line setup yesterday before 9:00, we call again. And we get again the answer to be patient, it should work any minute now.
• 9th of November, 13:30: We call 1&1 another time. Now we get another reason for failing connection attempts: The line is not correctly switched. This again is a problem with DT and they can’t do anything about it but filing a failure report for them. Everything else is correctly configured, even our password seems to be ok, but the connections are very unstable.
• 9th of November, 13:50: We again call our personal contact at DT backoffice Reutlingen. They now check the line - again. And we are still waiting.

As mentioned before, I want to give you some funny examples what might happen to you if you call hotlines of 1&1 or Deutsche Telekom. You can imagine, we have quite some experience with this now:

• DT: You call a hotline and after waiting several minutes listening to stupid music they kick you out of the line.
• DT: sometimes they even ask you for a review of their support (after not talking to any one)
• 1&1: You call a hotline (you pay 12ct/min.), work your way through the speech menu and get kicked out of the system - after exactly one minute and six seconds or 24ct!
• 1&1: they is a free hotline for technical support. Sometimes you get connected to this after you called another hotline number for 12ct/min. by the speech-driven menu system. Now you pay for the free hotline. The other way around (calling the free hotline, getting connected with the non-free) they change the costs.
• both: if you talked rubbish during the speech-driven menu you might crash the system. If not this is the fastest way to get a real person to talk to (after 2 unsuccessful attempts of understanding you). This might save you up to one minute.

to be continued...

(PS: if you wonder about the accuracy of this, I have several pages of notes taken during the phone calls...)

A lot has happened during the last months that was keeping me from blogging. I will give you a short update on this and hopefully I will be able to update my site more frequently again. As you can see, the todays daily spanish word already gives a hint on that.

So that you know what kept me from blogging all the time, a short overview what happened. First of all we had a workshop at the university that had to be organized. Also some project were finished with lots of deadlines. Along the way I finally managed to finish all papers for my studies in Madrid.

But since “all work and no play makes [me] a dull boy”, I took off after all this stuff for a two-week-holiday in Spain, evenly splitted between Madrid and Barcelona. You may find the photos in the usual place.

Now I’m back with full batteries and lots of ideas that want to be realized. Stay tuned and you’ll see!