Communication problems all around

The last day has been plagued with communication problems, or perhaps I should call them disappointments because the communication did take place, but the task was hard and the content was less than satisfactory.

It all started yesterday evening. At the beginning of the pandemic I suggested to have a weekly video-conference with my two younger brothers Jack and David and my mother. She has been living alone for more than forty years since she divorced my father, but has always enjoyed a very active social life, so I assumed that it would be hard for her to have to stay at home alone and organized the meetings. They were originally planned for Sundays at noon, because none of us was supposed to be ever working at that time, but as soon as the confinement measures started to ease, Jack (the middle brother) announced that this did not work for him because he "had to get out of town" every Sunday to recover from work and we would not have cellphone coverage most of the time. Saturdays would not work either for the same reason, so we moved it to Wednesdays in the late evening. We are all night owls, so we set 11:00 PM, which is late but should be OK because by then everybody has had dinner and cleared out what is needed, so we can all go to bed after the call.

Normally I am the one setting up the video-conference and administering access rights, so two weeks ago I warned them that internet access was going to be uncertain for me while in the mountains, and they might have to get organized themselves. Of course, the moment we connected yesterday, the first thing I asked was how it had all worked last week, and to my disappointment I learned that there was no call last week: apparently none of my brother had the time to set it into motion. Great.

The second disappointment came shortly after that: everybody had seemed quite excited in our WhatsApp group to know about my stay in the mountains, but the moment I started to tell how the rental house had had some shortcomings (including the lack of the promised internet connection) Jack quickly veered into relating a horrible rental experience that he had a couple of years ago... and the conversation never came back to my stay. So much for family interest and anticipation.

Photo: www.peakpx.com

The final communication problem happened the moment I tried to re-book our plane tickets from Easter. We were scheduled to go visit Karen's family for two weeks back at the end of March, but our flights were initially re-scheduled several times and then canceled, so we were offered the possibility to re-book them at no cost until the end of August, so I decided to give it a try today. I succeeded, but yt was hard and long.

In the first call I was close to 40 minutes in the waiting loop before I was put through, but then the guy found my tickets without a problem, confirmed that we were granted a free re-book, so I gave him the new dates, from the 4th to the 17th of October. He confirmed that there were seats available and asked me to stay on the line while he checked something. The wait extended over a minute, so I went to check the dates in the school calendar and found, horrified, that I had given him the wrong dates, one week too early! Knowing that I would have to correct myself the wait became almost unbearable, especially because it went on and on. The communication broke up five minutes later while I was waiting, so I just hoped that nothing was irreversibly damaged and dialed again. The second time the wait was only about 25 minutes, but when the waiting music stopped it was only replaced by a dialing tone which was never picked up. By then it was already lunch time so I decided to make a third attempt in the afternoon, and went downstairs to enjoy the delicious pork tenderloins and mashed potatoes.

Luckily, the lines were much less congested in the early afternoon and I finally got us new tickets (this time with the correct dates) in less than 15 minutes. The problem was that, with all the waiting and calling my work suffered. I managed to watch a couple of lessons from my online course and answered a few emails, but the result has been a bit poor today. Hopefully, things will be somewhat better tomorrow. See you all soon!