Telefonica Trials

A confused post about Telefonica…

Life in Spain is good most of the time. Despite the ‘little annoyances’ we have been subject to over the last two years, it is still a great place to live, no question. But when things go wrong I wish we didn’t nearly always encounter the ‘manana problema’. And it is a refreshing change when ‘manana’ turns out to be today… or perhaps it doesn’t…

I will explain…

To publish a post to this blog I need to use the Internet, obviously. But in actual fact, I am writing this entry on a blog poster and hoping it will eventually be published, as at this precise point in time we do not have access to the Internet; at least, not reliable access anyway.

This is not an unusual occurrence. Our ‘rural ADSL’ has its moments of being offline at some point every two or three days, but usually only for a few minutes or a couple of hours at most. Sadly this time it could be intermittent (or offline completely) for a few days.

Internet Statement by altemark on flickr

Telefonica are very proud of their rural ADSL network, and I guess, all things taken into consideration, they have a right to be. Spain isn’t an easy region to make available to the internet, with its mountain villages tucked away everywhere off the beaten track and the rather haphazard system used for the telephone lines. And recently, rural ADSL has been upgraded; no longer do we have to wait for ever for a webpage to load or give up the opportunity of watching a funny YouTube video because of slow download speeds. Now our line speed is respectable (well, respectable for rural ADSL anyhow…). We can log on and browse with the rest of the world and not forego pages which are heavy to load.

And when you consider where the telephone boxes are situated in most rural areas, it is no mean feat that they work at all. In our village, the switch box is housed in a ramshackle hut down an alleyway between two houses. It looks like it would make a great hiding place for local strays, allowing they could find their way through the heavy locks which look sturdier than the shack itself (and nothing appears to deter the local stray cats and dogs).

But so far the switch box has weathered most (but not all) storms and the wires do not appear to have been chewed into or disturbed by anything. There again, allowing for the current situation, I could be wrong.

Two days ago our phone lines went down. Not an unusual occurrence either. But a telephone call to Telefonica (with the constantly repeated phrase ‘English’ given to the answerphone message) and an explanation to the English speaking operator (always easier…) got a fairly swift response. The engineers fixed ‘el problema’ the very next morning.

Not so the Internet however.

I was working in the kitchen when I heard the neighbour’s telephone ring and I thought “great, now I can get on with my work on the net”. But it wasn’t to be. The little ‘msn messenger man’ spun round and round trying to log me in, with no success. Never mind, I tried loading Firefox , as Internet Explorer is a pain in the backside loading anyhow. But nada, just the ‘this webpage isn’t available’ notice.

So still no Internet.

After checking all connections in the house, my husband reluctantly called Telefonica again (he hates having to repeat ‘English’ several times to the answer phone…). He explained the situation (“Si, ahora tenemos una linea, pero no, no tenemos el internet” repeated several times, just to make sure…) and the woman on the end of the line said she would call the engineers again, but it may take a while for them to respond.

I guess they hadn’t thought to check that the Internet switches in the telephone box were still working when they checked out the phone switches. An easy mistake to make, I guess, after all, no one had thought to mention that we had no Internet, we assumed they would realise this as the phone lines were not working…

Anyway, within a few hours the engineer turned up to check the Internet switch in the phone box. Sure enough, it was faulty. He rang us to say it would be ‘manana’ before he could fix it and went away. The woman from Telefonica rang to inform us as well, ending her call with the usual “Is there anything else I can help you with? Have you considered getting your TV through our ADSL lines too…?” (My husband was tempted to reply that it would be nice to have a working ADSL line before considering that one, thank you…).

But strangely, as I am typing this post, the Internet is flickering on and off. Sometimes it is loading, but very slowly, sometimes nothing at all. Either way, that wasn’t happening before. Whether or not the engineer came back early to fix it, without telling us, I don’t know… It doesn’t seem to be considered important to tell us what is going on when something is mended, only when it is broken… but I do know that ‘flickering on and off’ will be a bitch to explain to the Telefonica help line if it continues…

So, if this post ends up on my blog at the same date I gave to the publication, perhaps the ‘Telefonica man’ did solve the problem without waiting for manana.

But if he did, he didn’t do a complete ‘fix’. And if he didn’t, I guess he is coming back manana… or perhaps not…

Sh** Happens – Twice!

We have had ‘drain problems’ again.

After the local plumber ‘did his magic’ with his rods and various foul smelling chemicals, life got back to normal for a while…

But then, about a month ago, I was in the shower whilst our washing machine was on. The washing machine emptied… and my feet were suddenly engulfed in soap suds! Obviously the ‘drains fix’ had not been a permanent one.

Well, we could have called the plumber back, but were loath to do so. He had not been cheap and he had not completely fixed the problem. Haggling in Spanish to try to get him to come back and fix it for free was not something we felt would achieve a satisfactory outcome.

When we had had potential problems with our Saluki and had spoken to the ‘translator man’, my husband had also mentioned our ‘drains problem’ and the man said he would help if necessary. So my husband rang him again and the guy rang the local council for us and got us a visit from the sanitations department (or whatever they are called).

But, as these things happen, by the time the sanitations man arrived, the problem had gone away again. The engineer decided that this looked like an outside drains problem rather than one inside our house. We breathed a sigh of relief as this would entail no more cost for us. So, the man and his team had a look down the street drain… and declared ‘no problema’.

Hmmm, what to do now? We just crossed our fingers and hoped ‘el problema’ would not return. Of course it did.

A few days later, the weather turned bad. Torrential rain and high winds buffetted our village. Because of a strange planning arrangement when our house was built, we collect rain water from surrounding houses. It passes along their gutters into a pipe which meets up with our house drains.

In the early hours of the morning, I was doing my night time shift on the computer, when I heard the dreaded bubbling and gurgling noises again. I look in the bathroom with trepidation… and found our bath filled with rain water.

The rain eventually stopped and the water slowly drained away, but we were left with a very blocked drainage system. Time to call out the council engineers again. The next morning, my husband drove down to the local council and asked for their help.

An hour or so later, two engineers arrived, armed with rods and hoses…and a pneumatic drill. One of them proceeded to drill a large hole outside our front door. My husband tried to tell him that it was very unlikely the drains came out there, as the outgoing pipe under our house was about 10 metres to the left of this spot, but the engineer declared that “esta aqui” because that was the spot under the water meter. He carried on drilling.

Pieces of concrete and earth flew everywhere as the guy got into his stride. Our whole house shook and, I guess, so did all the other houses in the street. However, when he was stood almost shoulder deep in the now very wide hole, the engineer admitted defeated. The drain “no esta aqui”. My husband gently pointed to the spot 10 metres away for the second time and the engineer shrugged and said “vale” and moved his drill to the required spot.

About two seconds later, he found the drains access. it was a couple of inches below the road surface. Now the two engineers could begin inspecting and working on the drain with their rods and hose.

To cut a long (and very messy) story short, they managed to fix ‘el problema’. It was internal to our house, but they fixed it for us at no cost. After clearing the drain completely (the previous plumber had just ‘made a hole’ in the blockage), they showed us what had caused the problem in the first place.

When our house was renovated, we had assumed that new pipework would be installed throughout. There had been nothing much wrong with the original pipe running under our living room floor, but it was old and a different circumference to new pipes, so joining the pipes from the new extension would have presented a problem.

However, it appears that ‘new pipework throughout’ had not been the rule when the project was under way. The old pipe had been left and the new drainage pipe from the extension had been joined to it, by placing the smaller (new) pipe some way inside the older one. This had left a ridge where the new pipework ended and this ridge had, over the months, caught stray pieces of toilet paper. These had become wedged, making a larger ridge for more to catch on. You get my drift…

The engineer told us it was “muy mal” that our builders had installed pipes this way. He said we were going to be faced with the same problem again in a few months time, unless we had the old pipe replaced.

To do this would mean digging up our living room floor, not to mention the cost of more building work.

I wonder if you still read this blog Mr Project Manager? If you do, then perhaps you would like to come and install the new pipe work for free? It must have been your decision to install the drainage system like this in the first place. There again, perhaps not, we could well do without further stress.

We still have a very large hole outside our front door. The engineers said they, or someone else, would be back ‘mañana’ to fill it in and lay new concrete. We have learned, however, that ‘mañana’ does not necessarily mean ‘the next day’ so we’ll wait and if no one turns up in another week or so my husband will go to the council and ask them to call again.

In the meantime, he has filled in the hole as best he can and covered the earth with some left over tiles. The neighbours are not particularly impressed as this does tend to ruin the look of the street a little. I guess that council visit should be made sooner rather than later…

But we are not complaining about the engineers’ work. They did it all for free and unblocking internal drains was not their job. We are just so glad they were willing to help.

Of course, at some time soon we will have to think about getting replacement pipes fitted in our house. This is more expense we hadn’t envisaged and certainly cannot afford right now.

Did you hear me say “no me lo puedo creer”? No, I’m afraid not. Having had so many problems with the renovation work before, I can believe that this particular problema has happened only too well…