This past Saturday, our phone mysteriously went dead.
Our bill was paid up. The phone line to the house hadn’t been knocked down. Lightning hadn’t hit (it has not rained since Oct.). What was the deal?
We’d actually had this happen to us before, so I knew I needed to get to the phone company and alert them to the situation. Unfortunately, when I got to their office early Saturday morning, no one was there. A call to the office (on our cell phone) yielded nothing but rings.
“Okay, gotta wait until Monday,” I told myself. “Get there first thing in the morning and they should have the phone back up by the afternoon.”
I got to the phone company’s office around 8:30am on Monday. The lady behind the desk took down our phone number, called it to make sure that it was truly out of order (it was) and then made another call to get their “service” guys on it. Or so I thought…
By 4pm on Monday, we still had no phone and I went back up to the office.
When I inquired as to why our phone was still out of order, I was informed that the repair guys didn’t get my phone number in time and that I’d have to wait until the next day. “Sorry,” they said. “Be patient.”
Patience isn’t just a virtue over here in Africa. It is a necessary tool of survival. If you don’t have patience, all of the waiting you do here (for restaurant food, the ‘man with the key’, the next time you see family, people to come to a meeting, cows to cross the road, your phone to get repaired, etc, etc, etc.) will drive you absolutely crazy.
Well, since I had already waited two days, did my best to get to the phone office in a timely manner and witnessed the woman giving our phone number to somebody on the other line (maybe she was trying to fake me out — if so, it worked!), so my patience was pretty thin. Grasping for straws, I asked to talk to le chef, the man in charge.
They told me he wasn’t there. Considering how things were going, that didn’t surprise me. I was left to nothing but grin and bear it, make sure they had my number on the next day’s “service” list and go home.
Happily, our phone came back on this morning, we are reconnected to the world and I can post this silly blog.
The phone company should be happy too. I was going to have to call the Better Business Bureau!
Wait. There isn’t a Better Business Bureau here!
Oh well. If there was one, their customer service wouldn’t be much better. I guess then we’d need a Better Better Business Bureau or a Better Business Bureau Bureau…
Guess, I’ll be better off cultivating the virtue of patience.
