Spanish views from a small town

I've had an internet problem these days. Fiber remains elusive, though another company tells me they're working on getting Movistar to install the damned connection box. I won't be holding my breath. My wifi router, after two weeks since its billing period began, reached the maximum of the gigas it offers me, and my connection slowed to a snail's crawl. I shopped around, found a mobile package with unlimited calls and 100 gigas, that works with the antenna of the only provider that has coverage around here. I contracted it, inserted the SIM card in an old phone, and now use it as a hotspot. The fine print said the company allows tethering, so there should be no problem. Why else would they offer so many gigas? Still, I'll wait a month or two, paying for both services, until I finally get rid of the old one, which only offers 40 gigas a month.  This week we have finally gotten summery weather. It's warm, and I'm not complaining. Yesterday, it reached around 3...

This morning I went walking again, around the hill behind our house that I crowned on Saturday. It wasn't as long a walk as I had thought. The good thing is that my body is beginning to re-adapt. While I was on my last leg, deep in the woods, I received a phone call. It was Movistar, on the installation I was awaiting. This past Saturday, at midday, a technician had come by to see where to install the box for the fiber hookup. He looked around, and decided he would send in a map to install it where there is a copper box now, on a post inside my property. Fine.  But the woman on the line said that my installation was denied. Apparently, two neighbors would not sign permission to allow the technicians to install the box. ???!!!!???? I held the phone away from my head and started swearing up and down, the birds listening attentively. I then calmly explained that the technician had said he would send in a report to put the box on a pole that was standing upright in my property. She sa...

I want to smash two plates, five glasses, and a window. I want to howl in anger and frustration. My internet odyssey isn't over yet.  The technicians from Movistar came this morning. After calling yesterday to make an appointment for nine o'clock this morning, they came at nine thirty. They came, said they would check along the line to find a hook-up box, and would then proceed to install the fiber. One went down the road, and the other went up the road. After a while, they both came back, shaking their heads. There is no hook-up.  Almost three years, three years ago, they installed the fiber cable. Since then, there has been no follow-up to install the box. Nothing, zilch, nada. Movistar probably installed the cable because of pressure from the regional government to extend the network of fiber to rural areas. But they stopped at that. The rubes don't really need internet, after all. Milking cows and feeding the pigs doesn't require a computer. So now, I have to wait...

Yesterday was my second day with video classes. There was no comparison between Monday and Tuesday. Monday was tranquil; yesterday was chaos. Add to that a blackout, and online learning is still a thing of the future in small towns and villages. It started out fine, with just one student. The second hour was one of the most challenging ones, however. The howling winds and strong rain caused a blackout that affected me and three others. Only one was spared. So, my phone switched to the phone data from the wifi, and things slowed down a lot. I didn't even have a 4G connection; my phone said H+. I had had my Whatsapp open on the computer, as well, so I could look at pictures the students had sent me of exercises they had to do. Now, I couldn't answer questions or explain how to get the answers.  The lights came back on after about ten minutes. I restarted the computer, but the wifi signal was red, and I didn't have an internet connection on the computer. It seemed that the bla...

My journey to change to fiber optic internet service should have finished yesterday. The technician had an appointment at twelve in the afternoon to hook us up. So, I should now be on broadband, footloose and fancy free, right? No.  The technician came and looked at the installation. He said he couldn't see a hook-up box on the posts next to my house, and that he would go walking along the road until he could find it. I waited as he walked. He kept walking. He reached the end of the road and came back. There was no hook-up box. And, as far as he could tell, there was no fiber optic cable. AAARRRGGGHHH! I pointed out that I have a copy of a permission my husband signed, back in the summer of 2018, giving Telefónica/Movistar permission to place fiber optic cable on the telephone wire posts that were in my property limits. I remember perfectly, a week or two after signing, that technicians came by and went stringing up the new cable from house to house, coming from the direction of th...

My internet odyssey might be coming to an end, but not the way I had planned it.  Yesterday morning, I went to the bank to pick up a paper that certified my account was mine. That was the easy part. Since it was such a wet, miserable morning, there was only one other person inside, so I just stepped in and was attended fast. I thought that it might all go smoothly, after all. My thoughts were stopped in my tracks at the computer store. The shop assistant, on the phone with the technician from the company R, began expressing concern in his monosyllabic answers. After about fifteen minutes, he explained the situation to me. It seemed that my house not being "normalized" was more of a problem than anticipated. To "normalize" it, a petition would have to be sent to the central office. Because I live where I live, the response would most likely take at least a month. After that, I might have to wait another month or two to be hooked up.  So, the only thing to do was to c...

My internet connection via wifi is just getting worse and worse. Today, I went to a computer shop in town where they offer different services, to sign up with another company for fiber, now that Telefónica/Movistar put through a cable down my road. Things are not so simple. The only company that offers only internet (or at least at that office) is R, previously a regional Galician company that has since been bought by Euskaltel, a Basque company. It has an obligatory permanence of at least a year, after which, I was warned, they would probably hike prices. Fine. I still settled for it because I have few other choices.  First problem was checking my street number. It turns out that I do have access to fiber, but my house has not been "normalized." The reason for that seems to be that it has never had a landline nor any other telephone connection by wire. So, I waited for close to an hour as the person who was trying to insert my information on the company web page explained th...

My internet connection is driving me nuts. Today, I called about changing to fiber. It turns out that the company that hung the cable along our road is the old monopolistic Telefónica. I was advised to take the offer by their lower-priced company, O2, which includes 300mb and a cell phone line. That way, they would come faster, (instead of the wait of up to a month with another company) and I would then have the hook-up to later change to another company that would be cheaper.  Um, no. That sounds a lot like extorsion. I have always said that I would never make a contract with any branch of Telefónica precisely because of things like that. Besides, there is little cell phone coverage around here by them. The only infrastructure they have updated is the fiber cable they strung up. Ever since over fifteen years ago, when we bought our first cell phone, they have been affirming that they were updating their coverage. It's never been done. The person I was talking to said that the lack...

Since last night around midnight, our internet and phone service have been going off and on. When there was internet, it was so slow that nothing would load. Then, there would be no phone service. Around noon, everything finally came back. Until then, everyone who hooked up to the Orange antennas was cut off from the rest of the world.  It has reached the point at which we tend to take internet for granted. Through it, we can visit entire libraries, go to school, visit with friends, go shopping, do business. Having our service interrupted, even for a few hours, feels like walls have been set up around us, isolating us as if we were in a solitary prison cell.  Thirty years ago, being alone in the house meant being alone. There would be a landline, but that was it. A television or radio would bring us news, but we couldn't reach out through them to anyone. To speak with people, we had to leave the house and get together with others. Was it better? In some cases, yes. I find it m...

I have internet problems where I live. However, they may finally have a solution. To get internet, I had to contract wifi for my home, with a limit of 60 gigabytes a month. After that, internet walks slower than a turtle.  About a year ago, Telefónica, the company that held the telephone monopoly for ever so many years, installed a fiber cable along our road. But when I went to some different phone companies, asking if I finally had the possibility of getting decent broadband service, some told me I had no problem, but others told me my area still didn't have coverage. Just in case, I sat still. Last week, I went and asked again, and was told that, yes, I could get broadband internet now. Now, I just have to scout for the best offer.  And hope that what happened to a Welsh town doesn't happen to me. In the town of Aberhosan, every morning, promptly at seven, the entire town would lose its broadband internet connection. Calls, complaints, and probably threats, made the engineer...

How interesting. I checked my emails today on my phone, and looked into the spam folder, in case a legitimate one had gone missing. There was one there from PayPal. It was telling me my account had been limited due to suspicious activity, and to open an attachment.  Since I had made a payment with PayPal the previous day, my first reaction was that someone had somehow gotten into it. The next, that the payment was being stalled because the receiver seemed fishy. Once, some years ago, I bought something online with my credit card, and the bank called me to know if I had really done the transaction. They were holding it up until I replied because it seemed fishy to them. So, I thought that PayPal might be doing the same thing. But, since I don't like opening attachments on emails unless I ask for them, I looked at it more closely. The sender was simply PayPal Inc. and the message was in correct English. On the email they had sent me the day before, telling me the payment had succ...

Publicity. You just can't get away from it. Some call it inevitable, a result of our modern living. That without it, our economic system would collapse. Heck, it might even get boring. I remember reading a book by the wife of an American student based on a diary she kept while her husband was doing research at Moscow University in the 1970's. She described how empty of light and color the city was. There was no publicity. No billboards, no colored lights. Granted, one of the attractions of New York City is Times Square with all its lights and advertisements that cover what would probably be prosaic buildings in a prosaic square. Still, that doesn't mean we like to be told to try Mentos or shop at H&M in our every waking minute, no matter where we are. A case in point. I have a Facebook account. Along the side are groups and posts the gods of Facebook suggest I might be interested in. I ignore them. From time to time, they slip onto my wall "suggested posts."...

So, we’re living in the age of internet and inter- everything. We’re now connected all the time and everywhere. Houses have computers installed and you can control the lights and the blinds from an app on your phone. You can throw off the thieves while vacationing in Thailand, making them think someone is home. Especially in Europe, where the cities are more technologically advanced than in places such as the United States. That might be true in countries such as Finland, England, or France. Scratch Spain off the list. However much the government might brag about our preparedness, and our 3.0 society (or whatever’s fastest), we’re sadly far behind. And falling further behind every day. In rural areas 4G technology is slowly being implanted, slowly, as in slowly grows the grass in December. In cities it’s much more common to find free open wi-fi connections in cafés and bars. Some shopping areas are also equipped with it, such as the newest shopping mall in Santiago. The lar...