I'm going 2 weeks without internet at home and it drives me crazy. I'm always planning my time around the library opening hours so I can get my research and stuff done online. Then there's the mad rush to find all the articles and save them before the library closes so that I can read them at home. I hate it, I feel rather disconnected from the world and my friends back home. I can't Skype or webcam with Joey either.
My roomate is without internet for almost the whole month. When she tried to apply for internet through the phone, she thought that they were going to send her stuff. But ended up, nothing came. Calls to the call centre seem to result in different response. Some of them said that international students are unable to apply for internet, some said that we can apply for it just like the Swedish and some said that we had to pay upfront for the whole year. They can't even seem to be sure of their own internal policies.
Then we had no choice but to get the landlord to help. The plan was for us to register the internet under my roomate's name and pay for a year's subscription upfront. Upon payment, it takes a week for them to send the modem over. The landlord wasn't comfortable with having the internet under his name, I reckon it's just a Swedish thing though I find it hard to comprehend. My other coursemates applied internet under their landlord's name, so the bill comes every month and they got their modem within a week or so.
They took 2 days to send the bill over and I paid for it the very day I received it, hoping that my internet will come SOON. It's the 9th day since we paid the whole year of subscription and the modem is nowhere in sight thought I'm awaiting the postman's arrival eagerly every single freaking day.
Swedish people like to take things slow and it's not in their blood to call and rush for things, even though those are things you have paid for and have a right to ask for. The landlord finally made the call to the enquire about the status, and it's on the 9th day after we paid that they claim that the modem is not sent out yet because there's certain missing information such as date of birth.
All I feel like doing is to curse this freaking inefficiency. How can such inefficiency be possible for a big company?! If information is incomplete, why did the bill come so promptly? And if information is incomplete and they can't send the modem out or process our order, why didn't they bother to call and contact us? We freaking paid for the whole year! It's ridiculous that it took them so long and we had to call them and get such a ridiculous reply. Does it matter if they didn't get our date of birth?!
I've no idea how long are they going to take to send us our modem. Maybe after a week, they might claim that some information is incomplete again. Or maybe they lost our address. I'm lossing faith. I don't get it. I know people are laid back and relaxed here, but I really can't comprehend how they can stand such inefficiency. It takes forever to get things done here.
I reckon Singaporeans are simply too spoilt. We are too used to getting things done quickly and everything is about efficiency. If things are not done, we'll call and complain and fight for our rights. Practically everything can be done immediately and nothing takes more that a week. Maybe that's why work stress is so high and we always have too many deadlines and late nights.
I still can't believe that we take this long just to get internet, especially when we have already paid for a whole year's subscription.
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