We're Connected to the World!

After over six weeks of living in France, we finally got our landline phone, TV, and internet service. We ended up canceling our contract with SFR, since we had a contract with them for about 8 weeks and they didn't deliver the service. (The relocation company had put in our order with them two weeks before we even moved to France.) We switched to the French national telecom company, Orange, and in a little over a week we had all of our services ready to go.

The whole saga of trying to get the telecom services set up helped me see some differences between the way things are done in France versus the US. I guess the main lesson I learned is that there doesn't seem to be the same emphasis on customer service here in France. I say that because SFR canceled two different appointments with us on the day of the appointment without giving any reason why.

Also, things here don't necessarily seem to happen in the most logical manner. SFR was supposed to send a technician to our house to set up our equipment, yet we had to pick up the equipment ourselves. For the first appointment (which got cancelled at the last moment), we had to pick up an internet router/modem at a location in the city. When that appointment was cancelled, I had to return that modem and pick up a second one for the second scheduled appointment. (Why, you may ask, couldn't I use the same SFR modem for the second appointment? I wondered the same thing. It turns out that each appointment has a specific modem that goes along with it.) These pickups/returns are in the city, and since we live in the suburbs, it's an inconvenience to do all of this. Now that SFR cancelled our second appointment at the last minute and we've cancelled with them, I have to return the second modem. The most logical solution for all of this would be to have the technician who is installing the equipment bring it along with him or her on the installation visit.

One of my general impressions of being here so far is that many things seem to be unnecessarily complicated and burdened with paperwork. Efficiency does not seem to be a strong suit of the French. (I remember getting our cell phones at SFR when we first moved here. It took about three hours and I had to fill out and sign six sets of paperwork for three phones.)

Since I just mentioned getting our cell phones with SFR...here's one more little tidbit about dealing with them. When I got my cell phone, it was a 99 euro phone, but it came with a 50 euro rebate offer. The woman at the SFR store gave me all the paperwork for the rebate and even filled it out for me. All I had to do was mail it, which I did. Last week I got a letter from SFR saying I would not be getting the rebate because I had bought my phone at a store that was not participating in the rebate offer. How could that possibly be true when the employee at that SFR store was the one who gave me all the paperwork for the rebate offer?