“Customer Service” and “Le Glas”
In choosing to compose these series of Letters from the Pyrenees I was, in some measure, attempting to get away from the “year in such and such a place” type of of writing where the trials and tribulations of renovating a property in another country are described. I was keen to avoid the cliches of plumbing disasters, eccentric neighbours and unreliable yet comic builders. To begin with, we are not doing up a house; our neighbours are mostly sane and conventional and the tradesmen with whom we have had dealings have been few. We have, however, been obliged to navigate our way through a number of tricky situations in order to establish ourselves as functioning residents. I think there is an expression for customer service in French - probably Service Client - but it’s not widely publicised and, in my experience, not generally available. Service après vent (after sales service) is better understood, although getting to the point where you are actually in receipt of whatever it is you’ve paid for can prove challenging in itself. Take the telephone and internet, for example. After applying for the connection, but before we had actually been connected, we were given the choice of being kept up to date about the progress of our order by either phone or email. Luckily we had access to Alf’s wi-fi, and so didn’t make a fuss. Imagine our disappointment though when, after waiting two weeks, we were informed that our connection would by made in three weeks’ time. But this was nothing compared with our surprise when, the following day, another email declared that the connection had been made the week before. Great! I bought a cheap phone from Leclerc (supermarket), plugged it in and it worked. Now, we had a deal with SFR (sorry, don’t know what it stands for) where we could phone any country in Europe at any time for the same monthly charge. So I did… a lot. It worked really well. That evening, however, I received an odd call: “Jean-Paul?” “Sorry. I think you have the wrong number.” “OK. Sorry.” The lady caller hung up. Three minutes later the phone rang again: “Jean-Paul?” “Sorry Madam. You have the wrong number again.” “I don’t think so.” “What number are you dialling exactly?” She recited the number as if by heart. “I think there’s a problem here,” I offered. “That isn’t our number.” “No,” she replied. “It’s Jean-Paul’s!” Jean Paul is our sane and conventional neighbour. The following day it was established that Jean-Paul had been without a telephone for a week… since, coincidentally, our own line had been activated. We had the neighbour’s phone line with access to all his messages and, what’s more, I had been merrily calling England on his bill. “We need to get this sorted out,” I said. Jean-Paul agreed.