Pulling your hair out

Waiting for Telefonica must be the most frustrating experience ever.

Some of the people on our estate have lived here for four years without a telephone. Then Telefonica arrived with their cable from the village and all our hopes were raised. Sure enough a couple of weeks later blue vans appeared and people started to get their phones.

The deal is that you receive a call to tell you when the installer will arrive. Then you wait for him to come. In some cases you wait and you wait and you wait. In our case we didn't get a call, the man just arrived one evening. It hasn't make any difference though because we still don't have a connection.

In our case the line that the installer had activated was in the box down the road. We couldn't take a cable down to that one though so we took the cable to the box at the top. Now we needed the line in the new box to be activated. That was supposed to happen the next day. The next day came and we were told that actually we needed a new number -the man would return mañana pasado. After mañana pasado, pasado I phoned Telefonica yesterday to find out what was happening only to be told that our order had been cancelled.

I don't think that the man at the other end of the line understood me fully when I explained that we already had a phone, a router and the cable from our house to the box in the road and that all we needed was the line activating.

I'm not sure which is worse; to still be waiting for a call to say when your installation will take place, to be waiting for the installer to arrive or to have a phone but have no connection.

Once you have the phone though the sting isn't over. You then receive a bill for your connection which might be more or less than your neighbour's bill. One couple told me that they'd paid more for just a phone than another couple had paid for a phone and ADSL.

Telefonica are starting to make BT look good!