How Many Million Days?

Being the responsible adult that I am, I forgot to pay my internet bill last month. In Indonesia, if you miss a bill, they usually cut you off. If you don't pay your electricity bill by the 20th of the month they shut your power off by the 25th. This is exactly what happened to my Indosat M2 internet connection. In all fairness, I did pay it before the end of the month but I was still too late. My lame excuse is that they didn't send me an invoice last month. They emailed me invoices every month for over a year and then they suddenly stopped. Paying the bill is the easy part, the hard part is trying to get them to turn the internet back on.

On Tuesday, I tried calling the hotline number they have on their website. After playing trial and error with the "press 1 if you are a customer" "press 3 if you are wearing shoes", I finally found a way to get directly connected with an operator. Not so much, I was put on hold while waiting for an operator and after 5 minutes of soft rock and the voice telling me to continue to wait, the voice told me that they were too busy to help me and disconnected me. I tried 4 more times with the same result. Later in the day, I tried again. Finally, I got through. The operator was very friendly, a little too pleasant and polite since all of these pleasantries were costing me money as my cell phone credit was slowly depleting. After a few minutes of confusion, she told me that she was going to put me on hold to go check my file. She repeatedly requested that I don't hang up. Why would I hang up? It took me 5 tries just to get the operator on the line. 2 minutes later, the soft rock was interrupted by the dreaded beep beep beep telling me that my phone had run out of credit. Seconds later, against my will, my phone hung up.

Later that night, I decided to try to call them again on my house phone. The alternative was a very far drive to one of their outlets followed by a 1 hour wait in line. I tried the same path I had memorized to get through to an operator. This time, when I "pressed 3 for network coverage", there was the following message "IM2 is experiencing technical difficulties in.....DKI.......Jakarta and......................Bali........This problem should be fixed in..................twenty-one......million.....six hundred.....thirty-four......thousand and.....seventy.....five.....................days.......thank you for your patience." I laughed so hard that I had to hang up and listen again to make sure I wasn't crazy. Same message. I called again and made my better half listen since I knew she wouldn't believe me. Perfect, all I had to do was wait 59 271 years and my internet connection would be restored.

After I stopped laughing, I tried again, this time successfully getting through to an operator. We went through the same scenario as last time. After putting me on hold twice for more than 5 minutes each time, he told me what I already knew; my account had been blocked since I hadn't paid my bill. I explained to him that I had indeed paid my bill on the previous Friday (4 days earlier) and that the reason I was late in paying was that they had forgotten to send me an invoice. He asked me if I had provided them with evidence that I had paid my bill. Evidence? "Yes, you must fax evidence you pay bill, mister" he replied. I told him that I didn't have a fax machine in my house (who does?) and asked if I could instead email the e-banking transaction. He told me that this was not possible and that it must be a fax. I asked him how many days it took to process payments from the bank and he said 2 days. I told him that it had been 4 days since I paid the bill. He once again asked me for evidence. I decided to turn it back on him. I explained that they didn't send me an invoice and I still managed to pay my bill (3 days late) and despite that, they needed evidence that I had paid my bill. I started thinking like Seinfeld and asked him if he could fax me evidence to prove that they had sent me an invoice. He took me seriously and said that they couldn't since I didn't have a fax machine. I kept persisting that in this day and age, it was absolutely ridiculous that I was going to have to go an internet cafe, get my bill printed and then fax it to their accounts department and then call another 5 time to get an operator to go through a pile of papers trying to find my "evidence". He told me to wait and not to hang up when he put me on hold. So I waited and waited and waited.

More than 10 minutes later, he had a solution. They were going to un-block my account for 2 hours so that I could go online and email them the evidence that would prove that I had paid my bill. I agreed and went online to email them my evidence. An hour later, another guy from Indosat called me to inform me that they had unblocked my account. He asked when I planned to send my evidence. I informed him that I had sent the evidence via email 45 minutes ago. This really confused him. He put me on hold for a couple of minutes. Finally, he came back and asked me if I was sure that I had emailed the evidence. I insisted that I had. He said that my internet should be back on by the next morning even though, at that moment, he had no evidence. He asked if there was anything else that he could do for me. I requested 2 things 1) Please send me evidence to confirm that you have received my evidence that I have paid my bill 2) Please send me an invoice every month. He asked why I hadn't received my invoice. I replied that I didn't know. He asked if I had changed my email address. I hadn't. He said that I must have done something wrong in order to not receive my invoice. At this point, I was tired of talking on the phone. I agreed that I must have done something wrong and apologized (for hacking into their billing system perhaps?) and told him that I didn't require any further assistance.

The only good thing to come out of this is that i found out that the monthly price for my internet package had dropped by almost Rp. 20 000. I'm hoping that they provide me with evidence to show that I overpaid on my last bill and that they owe me Rp. 20 000. If they don't, I'll survive I guess. After all, paying an extra Rp. 20 000 is worth not having to wait nearly 60 000 years to get my connection restored.

Half Assed

After spending a long time with very slow and sometimes nonexistent Internet from Indosat M2, I decided to make the big plunge and get Speedy home Internet. Upon arriving home from work, I was very pleasantly surprised to find out that the Internet was very fast by Indonesian standards. For once, things worked out just perfectly. A few friends told me that they had Speedy and that it was very slow. How well your Internet works seems to be geographic and there is no rhyme or reason to it. Lo and behold, things were not as perfect as they seemed.

The "technician" ran a wire from where the phone jack in the living room to the room that has the computer. He did a great job of neatly attaching a phone jack to the wire and plugging it into the modem. What he didn't do such a good job with was the placement of the wire. It is common practice here that wiring gets neatly attached to the wall/ceiling from it's source to where it is needed. This applies to telephone wires, cable or air conditioning wires. He decided that it was too much work and simply left it on the floor. It went from the phone jack, behind the fridge (source of heat and fire hazard), across the entrance to the kitchen, around the back of the television, under a couch, across the back door entrance, into the office (couldn't close the door without crushing the wire), and into the modem. In the initial excitement of trying out my new Internet connection, I failed to notice that I had almost tripped over the wire when entering the office. This really blew my mind, it set a new precedent for incompetence that would be hard to ever beat. I knew it was too good to be true.

When I asked the maid why the technician hadn't attached the wire properly to the wall. She said she asked him the same thing and that he said that it was "susah" (too difficult) and left. There isn't even an analogy that I can conjure up to put in perspective how ridiculous this is. Western standards of doing things are hardly ever met in this country but this was just plain stupid even by local standards.

I got on the phone with Speedy who told me I had to call Telekom (phone company). I called Telekom and they told me that I had to call Speedy. I refused and started throwing a fit on the phone (it was all an act to get something done). The operator then agreed to help me and said that all she could do was file a complaint with my local Telekom office. She said there was no promise of when (or if) they would come to fix it. I asked for the local Telekom office number so that I could call them directly and she told me that she didn't have it. I then went off on a tirade about how incompetent the whole Telekom company was and said that I was going to cancel all of my services with them. Once again she said there was no promise of what would happen. This country has taught me great patience but there are rare times when the only way to get something done is to yell. This, in my opinion, was one of those times.

After I got off the phone, my lady started giving me grief about how I had to be nice to people if I wanted them to help me . One hour later, 2 technicians appeared at my door. My lady didn't say a word but definitely saw the sinister grin on my face and knew I was right for once. These 2 guys were top notch, they couldn't believe that the other technician had left the wire as it was. They promptly fixed the problem by using a table with a chair on top as a makeshift ladder. It is not uncommon for somebody to show up at your house to let's say fix your roof and not have a ladder. Note to self: buy a ladder. Anyways, they flawlessly finished the whole job in 15 minutes and one of the guys even helped me with a computer problem that I thought was an Internet problem. To their pleasant surprise, I gave them both some "uang rokok" (cigarette money) and thanked them for doing such a great job.

Despite the incompetence, I must say that speedy Internet is great and that I highly recommend taking advantage of their current promotion if you happen to live in Jakarta. If a technician named Rizky shows up, tell him that I said that he is the laziest bastard on the planet. If you live on the other side of the world, screw you and your lightning fast Internet! I tested my connection today and it can download at 0.86 Mbps and I am absolutely thrilled with this speed.

P.S. Upon doing spell check, I learned that "Internet" is spelled with a capital I. I have no idea why, it's not a person's name or a country. Maybe it's just really important.