Lack of communication

It’s been five days since I lost my ADSL connection and Telkom have still not come to fix it, despite three phone calls and accosting a Telkom employee who I came across at one of their roadside boxes. All those I spoke to assured me that they worked on weekends, understood that I had no contact with the outside world, needed access to my bank accounts, conducted a business via email and internet, had urgent business accounts to send via email and just generally wanted to see what was happening on Facebook. To no avail.

I have got so used to sending out this daily blog that not being able to do so is akin to shutting down a newspaper – not that I consider what I send out as news, but at least I feel that I am notifying everyone I know that I am alive and kicking and that I still have something to say.

Sometimes I feel that perhaps what I am saying is not very clear and misunderstood. Take for instance the local estate agent who advertised that he would do a free valuation for the Rates objection procedure. I immediately responded to the advert and he duly took down my details, making an appointment for the next week. I made it quite clear to him that, should he need to contact me, he should use my cell phone number and not the land line, as we keep that phone in the garage and don’t answer it much, mainly because anyone we know uses our cell phones and the other calls are likely to be from cold calling telesales staff stationed in India, or a Nigerian lottery operator wanting to pay a fortune into your bank account. Anyway, the appointment came and went and an hour and a half later, I phoned his office, only to be told that he had tried and they had tried to contact me on the land line which I didn’t hear, it being in the garage. I told the lady that I had specifically asked them to use my cell phone and asked if they were trying to save money on phone calls (a rather snide comment, which she fortunately chose to ignore). Eventually we sorted the times out and he turned up and spent a pleasant half hour looking around.

Today he phones my cell phone and says, I’ve been trying to contact you on your land line but it just rings. So obviously my initial instruction was so badly worded and the information so poorly understood that he was totally confused. Again, he missed our next appointment and another hour and a half later, he phoned. This time I actually was in the garage and answered the land line, only to hear that he had been there (the dogs didn’t bark and I can only think I had my head in the deep freeze or some other soundproof place) and he had gone back to the office to get my number. Aaarrgghhh! Maybe it isn’t me, maybe it’s just him who is the scatty one.

The point of this story, believe it or not, is that I cannot abide it when people don’t stick to their appointments. But if you didn’t catch that, perhaps it is me who has the communication problem.