Back online

Last week our internet died. We'd been waiting for it to happen for months yet, once it actually got turned off it was still a shock or more of an, oh shit now we have to deal with getting something else hooked up, moment. The reason we'd expected it to happen is that we had been using the internet that existed in the apartment, which I'm pretty sure should have been turned off, and we had not moved it into our name. We figured one day someone would discover they had forgot to turn the internet off when the old tenants left but in the meantime... So last week, much to our disdain, the plug was finally pulled. Now in the States, no big deal, call the company and whella new internet within a short amount of time. Getting anything done in Norway, however, can be somewhat of a challenge. This country does not have the same notion of customer service as the States and we have been told many times that things just take time. Back home when internet goes down you have to wait at most a couple of days to get someone to fix the problem or hook up new internet. When a person calls customer service they expect a call back the same day; this is not the case in Norway. It took us four calls, speaking to one rep who had no clue what the hell he was doing and then two reps that promised our "case worker" would call back plus another two days after the case worker finally called before we got internet back up an running. The funny thing is that we have the wiring and the modem and were essentially just changing over the name on the account to our own which one would think could be done in a day. Not so much. Yet I am not going to complain, it's back up and running and I am loving my new connection to the outside world.

Ironically the day after we got internet connected our online bank went down. By down I mean we could not draw out any funds or use our debit or credit card anywhere until the problem got fixed. When I contacted customer service I was told they were working on it and hoped to have it fixed soon. Did I mention this happened on the Wednesday before the country shuts down for Easter for five days or that it was the day we planned on driving my Mom to Sweden or the fact that Jeff had just ran to get our car out of the shop where when he went to pay the card reader said, "can not connect to bank." Uuuggghhh. Luckily we still have cards from the States. Jeff put the car's bill on the Visa, we then pooled all our available Kroner together and decided we had enough for gas and lunch in Sweden and then got the awesome idea to use our Glacier Bank debit card to pull more money out once we got to Sweden. The plan worked and we were able to have an adventure in Sweden and buy what groceries we needed to get through the Easter holiday. Now how pissed off would you be if your bank "went down" in the States and when you called you were told it would be fixed, soon, and then no apologies were made about the inconvenience. Only in Norway - ha ha. A post will be coming soon about my Mom's visit and our trip to Sweden.