The telephone has arrived!

Some great news at last. The telephone company came yesterday to connect up the house. How long has it been now? On the waiting list for at least 5 months for a number. Then about two weeks ago I paid the 3335 baht connection fee. The funny thing is, one of the guys seemed to know me or at least knew everything about me. He was asking me questions like when was the last time I had been back to England and other personal stuff. I just smiled and nodded and pretended like we were old friends catching up on past times. I had no idea who he was. Maybe a parent of one of my old students. Remember that blog I posted last year? It is called Living in a Goldfish Bowl and it is so true. Everyone knows your business in Thailand.

Anyway, I digress. Back to the phone story. So, they came in the morning to connect up the house. They strung a black wire from the road and dangled it between electricity poles all the way to the house. Anyone who has been to Thailand would know about the hundreds and hundreds of spaghetti like black telephone wires that run along roads. Extremely messy. This is partly because half of them are illegal. I know someone who was having an ISDN line put in in order to connect to the internet. The connection box was apparently one kilometre away and the guy that did it for him said he could only run the wire the one kilometre to his house at night! I wonder why.

After they had connected my house I thought I would be able to use the phone straight away. But there were two problems. Apparently there wouldn’t be a signal on the line for a couple of hours and anyway, I had forgotten to buy a telephone! So, that evening I went off to Big C and bought a couple of cheap telephones. I came back home plugged them into the wall outlets and then proceeded to ring myself! Oh, the sweet sound of a phone ringing.

Great. My Internet company now has a telephone line. All I have to do now is get an Internet connection! Then we will be in business. I am so happy that all of this has been completed before the summer holidays. I didn’t really want to keep going to school every day. Now, everything can be done in the office. Just need to get connected to ADSL. I wonder how long that will take?