The telephone saga

The telephone saga has two parts, neither of which had reached a conclusion when I wrote this scheduled post on Satuday afternoon. First, the landline and internet; second, cellphones.

When we left Israel last year, we froze the landline. On Sunday, the day after our return, ADC called Bezek, the main landline provider in Israel (formerly a state monopoly), to unfreeze the line. He was assured that there was no problem. At the same time, he arranged for internet access on the line, as the Hebrew University has a special deal with Bezek for its employees. On the way up to Jerusalem on Monday, he received a call on his cell phone saying that everything was ready for him to start using the internet, he just needed to acquire a router. When we arrived in the flat, we discovered that there was no line. Assuming that there might be a problem with the phone, ADC waited until Tuesday morning, when he acquired a new phone along with the router, before calling to complain about the line (or lack thereof). He was told that a technician would arrive by 6 p.m. on Thursday. At 5:45 on Thursday, ADC called Bezek to ask why we still had neither landline nor internet, and eventually browbeated the call centre into admitting that their technician had fixed our line, but then crossed it with someone else's!! Another technician will come on Monday afternoon, and hopefully after that we will rejoin the 21st century.

Cellphones: I had been exceedingly concerned about a cellphone before we arrived in Israel, as my phone had gone AWOL in May. Very luckily, the phone in fact had been in Kfar Saba all along, and I have neither been entirely cut off from the outside world, nor will I have to change my phone number. However, for historic reasons, ADC and my phones belong to my father's pharmacy's business plan, and now that A and S also have phones, we want to be independent. I thought I would be able to deal with this in Kfar Saba, but the shop I planned to go to had closed down. Things did not seem that urgent (the boys mainly use Whatsapp to communicate, which functioned even without an Israeli SIM), until it became apparent that they would arrive in Jerusalem before we had internet - and thus WiFi - in the flat. My brother-in-law, who is now working at the pharmacy, is in charge of dealing with the phone, and spent quite some time trying to transfer us to the status of private customers of the same provider, while retaining the same numbers, to no avail. At one point I thought he had said it was possible, so I bought new SIM cards for the boys, but I will be returning them and going to another provider on Sunday. This is hugely frustrating and took up a lot of my time and energy, but tomorrow this ordeal will be over.

ETA: All's well that ends well. A large part of Sunday was dealing with phones. We eventually went with one of the major providers, and A immediately had both phone and internet access. It took a bit longer for me; I had phone access but had to call the helpline to reset a certain parameter in order to access the internet. I subsequently realised that I could use the phone's hotspot to go online on my laptop, and I used the help chat to work out what was going on with ADC's elderly clamshell (which considers the world to have ended on 31 December 2014), which refused to function at all. In the end, I put his new SIM in my old phone (also a clamshell), and that is what he is using now. Fortunately, I had already moved most of my contacts list into my smartphone by that time - I did that manually after connecting the old phone to my computer prompted the latter to ask what I wanted to print. I decided that manually copying contact details might take longer but would be less stressful than trying to find software to do so automatically. This morning I was able to solve S's internet access problems quickly, once againusing the help chat - I really love that function! In the afternoon, Bezek finally reconnected the landline and it took only a bit of a struggle to get the router to function (the instructions assume that you have a PC, and there are no instructions for a Mac).