As I Am: We Have Internet! 1

We have internet again! But it's really slow, so the only way I can get clear pictures downloaded is by using Picasa, and Picasa only allows me to download four pictures per post. There's probably a better way to do this but I'm so anxious to get out a post I'm just going ahead this way.

So, here we go! There are some pictures from the Berlin Zoo, the new house, etc. I couldn't get the pictures on in the correct order without taking an inordinate amount of time, so I'll put the text here (wrote it last night) and you'll see the pictures on this and the following posts.

So the last time I wrote was after we had gotten back from Berlin (pictures below from the zoo and other places). Since then, we have gotten thoroughly moved into our house, not just furniture, but clothes, books, and everything else! The coolest room in the house is the living room/dining room/reading nook. The bathroom and kitchen are a close second, and third place (fourth place, for those who are picky about placing) is the guest bedroom. The furniture for the living room was almost entirely provided for by my parents, those wonderful people who so very luckily for me moved from a larger house to a smaller house, leaving Matt and me with a lot of nice furniture, some antiques even. Somehow, the furniture fit perfectly in this space and I can’t wait for people to come visit.

The bathroom and kitchen are so cool because they are so clean and new. They contrast very well with some of the older furniture we have in the house. To outfit these two rooms we became good patrons of IKEA, the wonderful Swedish furniture/everything store. The guest bedroom has a place dear to my heart because it is full of antiques, and because it is the furniture that I have slept on most of my life. It’s a mess right now because that’s where I put all the decorations and everything else that doesn’t have a place.

Though the place still feels like it needs a lot of work done, I just have to remember where all of it started. When the movers brought our stuff in, they are required to empty the boxes so I am not left with a whole bunch of boxes and paper to deal with once I’m done unpacking. But their method of unpacking a box is turning it upside down on the floor. There were books, CD’s, DVD’s, clothes and everything else just lying on beds and on the floor. One good thing about that was that it made me pick up everything quickly because I didn’t want to live in a disaster, but nevertheless, it was certainly a messy process!

This last week Matt was at something called IRT- Individual Readiness Training. Before a deployment, the unit that’s going down usually takes 2 months to do training as a unit to prepare for the deployment. Because Matt isn’t going down with the unit, he’s just going to meet them down there, he only had to go for a condensed version of the course. I was very glad to have him gone for only a week, instead of two months. Though we have a lovely place, it’s very quiet. I’m used to college where there’s always a noise somewhere, and a wonderful roommate waiting for me to come home.

In case I forgot to mention it, Matt’s car did arrive. It almost passed inspection, but his tires are getting a little bald.

Remember how I said that we’d have free phone calls to the US and Canada? Well, after one of the biggest headaches I’ve ever had with any corporation, we are no longer going with that company, and think we’ll have to stick with skype. I would go into detail about how painful it has been, but I’ll just say that we learned some very important lessons about German customer service: it doesn’t exist. If something is going wrong, they don’t really care. If you’re about to sign up for a two-year contract for a phone line, they get annoyed when you start to ask questions about what comes with the contract. If they don’t give you the necessary information to get something done, it’s your fault because you didn’t ask any questions, no matter if you had no concept that a question like this needed to be asked. I am very good at asking questions and figuring out how a system works, they are just so stubborn!

I’ll give a short example (the home phone line example was too difficult). Matt and I had just bought Vodafone phones and our voicemails weren’t set up. To be able to set them up though, we had to get the prompting language changed from German to English. An easy task, we thought, just go to the Vodafone store and ask them to change it. We hand our phones over, the girl makes a call, says a few things to the other line, hangs up, and then tells us she can’t do it. Matt and I look at each other, and then ask her why not. She said someone else controls it and it is impossible for her to change it. Who controls it? Headquarters. Who is headquarters? At this point she looks at us as if we’re idiots and says something that the military has a contract with blah blah blah, and she can’t do anything about it. Can we call headquarters? Again, apparently we’re idiots, and no you can’t call them. So you’re saying there is no way for us to ever get our voicemails set up? Yes. Unless you have a code that came with your phone, but no, I can’t change it. Matt and I look at each other again, knowing that we both have the codes for our respective phones back at the hotel, and that this answer was such an easy one. Why she didn’t mention this to begin with, we don’t have a clue.

Basically, they don’t help you try and solve the problem, you have to drag them through the conversation, the whole time they’re getting frustrated with you, and can’t understand why you don’t already know everything they know. They will also get very uppity with you, and will very easily act insulted. Perhaps I’m overstating some things, but Matt and I have both experienced this on probably 10 occasions or more. The only place we got good customer service was with a nice older woman who works for the housing office, and she herself is an anomaly in that office.

So, we think we’ve made some progress on my job. After many conversations, we’ve decided that it might be best for me to get a fun part-time job that would enable me to get some income, and still have fun. I’ve played around with the idea of working at the framing shop or the outdoor recreation center, both of which would enable me to interact with cool people (especially the latter), learn new things, and encourage me to either frame everything in my house or go on lots of adventures. I’m thinking that working for the outdoor rec would be the most fun, and there are in facet 3 job openings there. The only drawback is that both of these jobs would be about 40 minutes away from here and possibly work until 6.00 at night, getting home around 7.00. But, these sound interesting and get me excited, so I’m going to check them out.