Another day, another task that takes far too long for so many complicated reasons.

My Internet doesn’t work. That is to say, I have a very odd problem with my Internet. The kind that if I were to explain it (and I don’t think I can) to my friend who is an IT savant, he would say “yah, thats not a thing.” But yet here we are.

So not to get into gritty details but my laptop won’t connect. Diagnostics say the problem is outside the router and lives with Maroc Telecom. I can connect to my router and text people, hobble my way through Facebook, watch a little TV until it starts buffering, but my laptop is a boat anchor. Won’t even hotspot with my phone which makes no sense. Is the problem my brand new laptop? Why no, thanks for asking. My iPad has similar yet differing Internet issues so…..

Maroc Telecom, my “service” provider, insists that I have to pay for a “fixte” phone or landline. The last time my Internet stopped working, because I hadn’t paid the bill 24 hours BEFORE the exact second it was due, the man came, fixed the Internet and then looked at me and said “do you even use the phone?” (In French / Darija of course) and I said no. Since it was late afternoon on the first day of Ramadan, he suggested that he would come back “later” and fix it.

Ok so the phone is dead and the Internet lives on. I paid the bill for months in advance so I wouldn’t have to deal with that over the summer. And now out of the blue this connection problem. Since I returned from Canada it has been degrading and now I can barely watch TV…but Netflix is fine. I KNOW!!!!! I told you it makes NO SENSE.

So today it’s done. I’ve got nothing. Under “normal” circumstances I would pick up the phone and dial 51 or something and connect with the call centre. But alas. Phone is dead. If you think I am going to look up a number to call for service from my cell phone then you have never tried to speak a different language over the phone. C’est impossible.

So there goes my day. I have a shower, get dressed and head over to Menara Mall. Not the closest office to me but the other one is filled with grumpy men who don’t help at all. This one has nice ladies who speak English. I hop a cab, tell the man I don’t speak French despite being from Canada, and that yes I love Morocco and yes I’m here with my husband, and yes I do speak a little Darija and boom, we arrive.

No one else is in the store, phew. The nice lady speaks passable English. I explain my problem. Being the master diagnostician that she is, she pronounces my fixte line to be the problem. (We all know that’s not the case). She picks up HER fixte line to call the call centre, which I would have done in my pajamas 2 hours ago if……anyway.

No answer. Now I don’t run a call centre but I do know they use a lot of technology to determine call length and productivity. I can not understand why they don’t have a way to divert calls for field technicians to one or two agents on a priority basis. I have sat for hours in Canada with various techs trying to call their offices for support and they call the same number we do and they wait in the same queue as everyone else. SURELY that cost is measured and deemed to be excessive waste, non?

I disgress.

There’s no answer. Why she can’t log a ticket from the convenience of her terminal I do not know. Maybe SHE doesn’t have Internet. Regardless, now her English has run out. She’s done. She has no more words to explain to me what the remedy is. She assures me that she has informed a technician and then she says “40 hours” and then a stream of fast French. No idea what she’s taking about.

I look at her with my befuddled face and say….”uh. What now? 40 hours until what? Or from what? Not 36? Not 48? 40? You’re sure now?”

So in 40 hours something is going to happen. If the Internet is to be believed, it’s the rapture, the end of the world as we know it. The end. Maybe she’s a doomsday believer and she’s trying to say “look, forget the Internet, we all going to die in 40 hours, go get drunk.”

Who the hell knows. But hopefully sometime in the next few days, a knock will come at my door when I absolutely do not expect it, and a technician will appear to fix my phone.

Or maybe not.