The land of bureaucracy

17

Yes, we’re living in one of the most cosmopolitan cities in Europe. We live in one of the livelier areas of said city. We love our apartment. We’re even starting to get out a little bit and meet some people. That doesn’t mean life is always a bed of roses here.

We have - at the 9 week mark - just concluded the Saga of Getting Television.

A number of you who know us might at this point be wondering if you’ve stumbled onto the wrong blog - we haven’t had cable TV in at least 14 years. Thing is, we’d been expecting to use TV to help us pick up the language. By watching shows we already know with Portuguese subtitles (Friends is on multiple times a day, for example), and/or tuning into children’s programming (Bob the Builder in Portuguese? Sim, podemos!), we can start to hear more of the language in “the wild” as opposed to the apps that feature speakers in studio settings who carefully articulate their words.

That hasn’t worked so well since the cable TV we’ve been paying to use since our arrival has been … sub-optimal. Our TV box was “connected” to our wi-fi. And it worked when it felt like it. Which is annoying.

Will Ross … and Rachel … get back … to …gether????

For weeks we’ve been after MEO, our service provider, to send a technician to do whatever needs to be done to get us a wired connection to our router. We’ve gone back and forth with phone support and have been told that first a regional supervisor needs to look at the complaint, then a technician needs to reach out to us and schedule an appointment.

Apparently, a technician may have tried to call but after we re-activated the complaint MEO terminated because they were unable to reach us, it turned out they had an incorrect cellphone number listed on our account.

Um, y’all gave us our phone numbers. You should know them better than we do. And back to the end of the queue went our complaint.

Two weeks ago, MEO called! It was exciting! Turns out, though, they were just letting us know that a technician would be calling “soon” to schedule that elusive appointment. Last week, we gave up. Bureaucracy won.

To understand why bureaucracy has such a firm foothold in Portugal government (our situation with MEO is not all that unique - any of our expat friends just grin and say “That’s Portugal.”), it’s important to remember that it’s a very young democracy. They’ve only been voting since 1974. Before that they’d been in a 42-year dictatorship. Funny things happen under dictatorships.

Since we’d heard nothing since the very exciting MEO call of 2 weeks ago, we wondered if perhaps there was another way. A work-around. What we’re calling the black market.

Yes, we got ourselves a black market MEO technician. He’s the same guy who installed the system in the first place; he just came after hours, ran some wires, flipped some switches, and voila, we are wired to the MEO box. 75€ later, we are good to go.

Now, if only we can get the telephone working properly …