Cut off – yet again

Except for the roads, for the most part the infrastructure in rural France especially, such as telephone, water and electricity is crumbling. And when you combine that with the fact that there is no real competition, since the state-owned monopolies still exercise almost complete control, and the general French attitude towards customer service, which is to fob the customer off and get rid of them for as long as possible, when things go wrong you have a recipe for disaster and intense frustration for the consumer. And this especially applies for anyone from northern Europe (eg UK, Germany, Holland) who are used to things being done rather differently.

This week I’ve been on the receiving end once more because yet again my telephone and internet went down for no apparent reason. This would not be an issue in northern Europe because after reporting it, a technician would have checked to see if it was a system problem and an engineer then despatched if all was found to be well technically, to check if there was a local problem. But in any case, telephone systems aren’t regarded nowadays in most advanced countries as being that complex and the problem would almost always have been resolved within a day or so.

But not so in France. As of yesterday, my service had been down for over a week and due to Orange (France Telecom) customer service spewing out a web of fantasy as to the cause, nothing had been done in practical terms to deal with or rectify the problem. The local Orange shop (which at over 25 kms I had to visit two or three times in order to try and get any kind of action) eventually just exchanged my modem, which turned out not to be faulty and I subsequently hit the roof after a friend insisted that Orange technical service (an oxymoron if ever there was one) who I could not call myself, called me and then, after a week they just asked me if I’d tried unplugging my modem and plugging it back in again. I ask you!

After I’d insisted, they eventually arranged for an engineer to call at my house despite my saying that nothing had changed here and that from my (long) experience both here and in the UK, it was obviously once again an internal Orange system problem as no signal was being received and that they should look within their system for the source of the problem. They told me that this is the ‘system’ and, monsieur, the way things are done in France.

Sadly the French can apparently see no connection with all of the above and why their economy is such a basket case. The stupid politicians will not break up the state monopolies, sell them off and encourage competition and hence greater efficiency as Mrs Thatcher did in the UK because such a notion is ideologically unacceptable to them. And the French just shrug their shoulders when you tell them about your problems, agree that the situation is awful and say that the same things happen to them too, so what hope is there that things will ever improve? I fear that unless there is a sea-change in attitude there never will be any improvement and France will continue to languish down the field or fall even further behind the other more competent nations. How sad if France is eventually viewed as just a beautiful country in which to live so long as you can put up with the down side that holds it back – short-sighted politicians, poor planning, bad management and ineffective administration. It’s a certainty in my view that France will never recover from the slump that it is in until these issues are addressed – and sooner rather than later I think.

A properly qualified telephone engineer arrived outside my home yesterday morning and was soon checking my line at the top of the pole on his elevating platform. He disappeared down the road a couple of times, presumably to the connection box about a kilometre or so away, and eventually had things back up and running in an hour or so. If only technology companies would stop having non-technical customer service departments who know nothing about the technology of their product and just end up wasting your time and theirs and irritating the customer big time. If the company had referred the problem to a real technician a week ago when they were first made aware of it a whole lot of time and aggravation could have been saved. And cost too, as a perfectly good modem was junked by the Orange shop – what kind of scale must that happen on if my case was anything to go by? But they never learn 😡

A footnote about attitude. As I do not currently have a tow bar on my Kia, I enquired at Point P, the local builders merchants, about delivering some ballast for concrete to my house. The cost for me to pick up a 400 kg bag from Brico Depot in my trailer would be 29.60 euros. The Point P depot is 7 or 8 kms from my house. They wanted over 60 euros for the same amount of ballast and over 90 euros to deliver it. I think that that says an awful lot. They had the last laugh though. I clearly have to get a tow bar for my car pretty quickly as otherwise work on my new wood shelter will come to a grinding halt with a change in the weather soon to be in sight. Only one problem. I couldn’t order one… because I had no internet. What a system, eh 😕