Online travails
One shouldn’t make fun of stuff one is getting for free, but AOL is just a ridiculous experience, at least the German version for Mac I’m using on my PowerBook. I had to resort to this measure since it takes Deutsche Telekom (sorry, “T-Com”) a full 14 days to establish a DSL connection even when the phone line is already there. They send you the splitter and router by mail! In any case, I’m starting to understand what some people mean when they talk about the internet being a boring place.
It’s all horribly corporate — some cubicle-dweller’s idea of “fun” — and ugly and cuts the connection every twenty minutes or so, though I’m not sure that’s necessarily AOL’s fault.
Be that as it may, I thought it would have been a nice gesture of T-Com to offer free dial-up while one is waiting for DSL to come, but hey…
Hi, what it feel like to be back to Germany?
Comment by novala — April 16, 2005 @ 10:55 am
You know, I never lived in Germany before — in fact, I’ve never been particularly interested in the country and never travelled much here, except for Berlin and occasionally in the South.
Funny thing is that most of the positive changes are at a rather superficial level: it’s *cool* to be able to just run out and buy whatever product or service you need, as opposed to being in a place where even the most mundane things take inordinate amounts of time to achieve. (Alright, I’ll except T-Com from that.) So far, I just marvel at the amazing quality of life you get here — no cars blocking the sidewalk in front of your house, no icicles falling from above, no Brucellosis and Hepatitis and Q-Fever lurking in things you eat, no crazies throwing hand grenades, no mines preventing you from venturing off the beaten track when hiking, etc. etc. … Call me superficial, but it’s funny how I had lost touch with “normality” as it is lived in Western Europe.
Comment by Administrator — April 16, 2005 @ 8:57 pm