June 2: Trials and Tribulations of Telmex

Saturday--noonish

Lazy day. I'm out on the ground floor terrace where I've been catching up on internet news and stuff. I just took off my sweatshirt jacket. It was in the low 70s when we first got up, but with a breeze, it feels cooler. Still sunny and dry, no rain yet. There's the constant high-pitched drones of the "rainbirds," actually cicadas. When they first hatch, they allegedly foretell the rainy season to come in about 6 weeks. We've heard that date is forecast to be somewhere between June 5 and 12. We'll see how accurate they are.

Recap on communication problems: Since Wednesday, May 23, we've had intermittent service from Telmex, the national telephone company. With each disruption, we've gone into Ajijic to the Telmex office and reported the outage via a special telephone station marked "English Spoken." After each visit, the service would return with 12-48 hours, only to go out again soon after. This last time, yesterday morning, we had the tone on the local telephone but no dsl connection to the internet or Vonage. So, making the trek again to Telmex (only about a mile and a half--big trek), this time we took a number and spoke to a representative at a desk. (The English-speaking telephone wasn't speaking anything at all yesterday, by the way. It rang and rang but nobody answered.) Anyway, after a reasonable amount of time, we met with the very nice guy who called things up on his computer and promised that we'd have a technician at the house between 9 and 11 this morning. Sabado? I asked. Si, he responded. So, that was promising.

We got home a little while later and the phone rang. Telmex calling to see if we were home and could a technician come over right now? You bet! (Actually, I said, si--don't how to say "you bet.") Within minutes the little green and white Telmex truck pulled up and a nice young guy came in and right upstairs to the connections. He was here three hours, during which time, he switched out the old modem for a wireless modem and eventually we were back on line. We're hoping now that whatever problem existed has now been resolved. But we couldn't have asked for more prompt responses or nicer service. We're keeping our fingers crossed we're back on line for good.