Pick-A-Day

September 2010
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It’s been a great 24 hours for my communication!

Monday evening, when I was at home, I got a call from my friendly T-Punkt store (T-Punkt sells stuff for T-Com (the telephone company, and now known as, I believe, T-Home) and what used to be (at least in Germany) T-Mobile (the mobile phone company, now happily known as “Telekom”).

The wonderful lady had happy news for me: my iPhone 4 was in the shop.

This thrilled me because she told me that it would be between four and eight weeks before I got my phone—but it ended up being exactly two weeks. I couldn’t make it Monday evening, so I went yesterday morning and after about spending an hour with paperwork (don’t ask), I walked out with the 16GB iPhone 4, in black, feeling rather happy.

Tuesday was also the day my DSL was supposed to be turned on—and it probably was, but I was waiting for my username and password to come in the mail—but it never did.

So today, when it still wasn’t in my mailbox at home, I tried calling—but apparently T-Com staffs its help center exclusively with people who do not speak English (this seems unlikely) and Technical Telephone/DSL German is not a language I’ve picked up (and I would be clueless as well in English). So I gave up and returned to my friendly T-Punkt store to get assistance from the saleswoman who’s been helping me all along.

It turns out that a radical assumption that I’d made was incorrect.

After the last time I moved, within Weimar, I specifically asked the T-Com technician if I should use the same username and password that I did on Paul-Schneider-Strasse at my new home on Abraham-Lincoln-Strasse. This was a very specific question, I made it explicitly clear. I practiced it in German. I double checked the question, I clarified his answer a couple of times:

Yes, even though I’d moved 3 blocks, I was to use the same username and password.

Six months later the Weimar T-Punkt shop explained to me that I was using the wrong username and password—that I’d received a new one in the mail and that I should have been using that. They dug into the records and could see that I had never used the new one and that I was logging into my old account from my new address and that I was a bad boy and that T-Com would send over their official T-Flogger who would administer some T-Spanks to punish me forthrightly.

Naturally after learning this lesson I assumed that moving from Weimar to Berlin would necessitate me getting a new username and password and that it would be in the post. I also assumed that the timing might not be perfect, so when the information wasn’t in the post Tuesday, I waited until today to get worried.

The upshot of it all is that apparently while moving three blocks (350 meters, 0.22 miles) in Weimar necessitates a new username and password, moving 282 kilometers (175 miles) from Weimar to Berlin means that I get to use the same username and password.

I don’t get it, but at least it’s working now.

And I still get to have a visit from the T-Flogger who will administer some T-Spanks to punishment for making a radical assumption.

2 comments to It’s been a great 24 hours for my communication!