24 April: Good Ol' American Ingenuity

Our satellite TV has been out of order for about a month now – ever since we got back from our ski trip, actually. First it was just Aravind’s satellite downstairs that wasn’t working, so I told him to call Herr Becker. I don’t think that ever happened (I have a feeling Aravind is just as uncomfortable speaking on the phone to Schwäbisch repairmen as I am!), and then our satellite went out too, so of course it was up to the Hausfrau to solve the problem. (A couple weeks ago John told Aravind that it was possible that the dish was out of alignment; Aravind apparently took it upon himself to try to move the dish because he finally admitted that he might have “bent” something.) Needless to say, I was really not looking forward to calling Herr Becker – sure I could tell him there was something wrong with our satellite, but I knew that I wouldn’t be able to understand anything that he said back to me. I happened to mention my delimma at last week’s makeup consultation and Thuy said that she knew an American guy named Mac who works on satellite systems on the side. She sent me is name and contact info, and I spent the last week trying to track him down. Finally I got a hold of him last night and he agreed to come over this evening around 7:00.

Mac was running late so he didn’t get here until nearly 8:30. He quickly diagnosed our problem – Aravind had indeed broken the mount for the receiver and the dish was out of alignment. Mac didn’t have a replacement mount and said it was an older unit (Herr Becker had installed it only a year ago!) so he wasn’t sure he would be able to find another one, so he did what any clever, resourceful American would do – he asked if we had any duct tape. John disappeared into the basement and came back with a roll of duct tape, which he had, naturally, brought from the States. Mac proceeded to tape the receiver back onto the mount and repositioned the satellite (which involved me standing in the living room and yelling “OK!” out the window when we got our TV reception back). He charged us 50 Euro for the visit, and said that the tape should probably last, but to call him if we had any problems. I said we only needed it to last until the end of this year at the most. Something tells me that if I had called Herr Becker, there would not have been any duct tape involved and the bill would have been a lot higher.

21 April: Computer E.R.

Sometime in the last week or two, our laptop’s hard drive decided to self-destruct. John tried everything he could to fix it, running all sorts of diagnostics, but to no avail. It got to the point where he couldn’t even keep it running in safe mode. Finally he consulted with my brother and determined that we would have to replace the hard drive. If you go onto HP’s website they will be happy to sell you a replacement drive for about 500 bucks, but if you go to a discount computer website, you can find the exact same thing for about 60 bucks. We decided to take a trip to MediaMarkt in Vaihingen this afternoon, where we found what appeared to be the correct type of hard drive (80 GB as opposed to the original 60 GB) for a measly 80 Euro. That’s one Euro per gigabyte! Not bad. Even better, John was able to successfully replace the hard drive and then he plugged the old drive into our big computer and recovered all of the files. I guess even if the hard drive is fried, it still can act as a storage device. The whole process seemed too easy (knock on wood). I mean, I was envisioning having to take the laptop to a computer repair shop and explaining the problem in German! The only bad news is that I lost my copy of Adobe Acrobat, but on the bright side, losing my PDF-making software has encouraged me to finally get this blog up and running.

23 March: Wintry Weather & Deutsche Telekom Strikes Back

It started snowing last night and we woke up to a blowing whirlwind of the white stuff. Seems like we brought winter back to Stuttgart with us. Several inches had fallen but it was very wet and already starting to melt by the time I went out to walk Cody. He was ecstatic to play in the snow again (for only the second time this winter), but it was only an inch or two deep in the woods because most of it had stuck to the tree limbs, creating a dense lattice-work far above our heads that prevented most of the snow from reaching the ground. As we descended into the woods we entered a muffled white world, as all around us the trees were literally coated with a layer of snow. I wished I’d brought my camera. Every so often a sagging branch would give way high above and shower us with snow. Cody tried to find the deepest bits to snuffle in. By late morning most of it had melted off the branches and enough had melted on the front walk that I didn’t have to shovel as part of my Kehr Woche duties.

Aside from this sudden resurgence of winter, spring has arrived much earlier than last year. Everyone’s gardens are bursting with color – purple and pink hyacinths, sunny yellow daffodils, purple and yellow crocuses, and round clusters of pink and yellow primroses. I am watching the tulips closely since I want to go over to the gardens in Ludwigsburg again. I only hope that the brief cold spell didn’t do too much damage to the rest of the spring flowers.

The phone rang early this afternoon. The display read “Withheld,” which I am always loathe to answer because (since it was too early for family to be calling from the U.S.) that typically means it is a German telemarketer. I answered reluctantly, and it was Deutsche Telekom. The woman introduced herself in rapid-fire German. I identified myself and asked her to please speak slowly. She repeated who she was and then paused and asked me (in German) if I spoke English. I said yes and she asked (still in German) if it would be better if she had her English-speaking colleague call me back. I almost burst out laughing and wanted to say, “You mean someone at Deutsche Telekom speaks English?” but I held my tongue.

Like clockwork, a rather haughty-voiced woman called me back five minutes later. She stated, “You currently have telephone and internet service with German Telekom,” (I thought it was so funny how she kept saying “German Telekom”) and I said, “That’s correct.” She said, “Yes, I know this is correct,” as if I was some sort of an idiot. She then tried to sell me a new combined phone/DSL plan for the low, low price of 49,99 Euro. This sounded like a good deal at first but when she started to describe the phone service, I noted that she said it only included calls within Germany. She asked me if I called the United States often and I said yes, very frequently. Those calls would cost extra, of course, on the order of 5 cents a minute. This didn’t seem to square up with what we are paying now. I told her that our current phone bill was right around 50 Euro a month already (our internet service is an additional 15 Euro a month), and does include calls to the U.S. She said flat-out, “That’s impossible.” Apparently she’d never heard that “the customer is always right.”

I started to think that maybe I should shut up before I revealed something – these are the people, after all, who sent us two complete modem kits and never charged us for one of them. She asked me to get out one of my phone bills to look at it. I started to fish one out and I could tell that she was getting impatient. Pesky Ami! Finally I decided to tell her that we weren’t sure how much longer we would be in Germany because of my husband’s work situation and that we were really quite happy with our current calling plan. She did not like this one bit and said, “But you are spending more money than you should be!” She wanted to know how long we might be staying and I said, “I don’t know – it could be one month or several months.” I finally convinced her to leave our phone plan alone but not before she insisted on “making a deal” to call back in one month’s time to see if I might reconsider. Needless to say I found this whole interchange rather amusing. I think I will make a point of not answering the phone when “Withheld” calls one month from today!