And then Spain went and spoilt it all.

Just a couple of short weeks ago there I was, in this very blog, eulogizing Spain as a place to live, when, all of a sudden Spain went and let me down very badly indeed. Clearly, I spoke too soon as my neck of the European woods began to believe it's own positive publicity and came over mighty complacent. Since my stubby index finger last pressed the space-bar, quite a bit has happened, and not all of it good.

Nice yacht - shite firm

I'll start with Telefonica - something I bitterly regret ever doing when I first arrived here in 2006 - who, frankly, deserve every word of bad press anybody has ever printed about them. Besides not being particularly cheap, their customer service department appears to consist of one man who hides his telephone in a drawer so he can't hear it ringing. This giant and hopelessly inefficient multi-national has twice replaced my wireless router in a forlorn attempt to provide me with an internet service that, if only for an  hour a day at three am, might perform fractionally better than a 1993 dial-up connection. This morning, ten days after this woeful organisation promised to upgrade my line speed, for which I foolishly/generously - you decide, agreed to pay an additional five euros a month, it took forty six seconds for my laptop to toggle between the BBC sport and news pages. Think about that for a moment, almost a whole minute for an aggravating green progress bar to complete it's short journey from the left to right hand sides of my screen. I'm seriously thinking about investing in a Telex machine.


El Corte eBay

 Not to be outdone, another famous Spanish name recently shamed themselves by almost completely failing to remember which one of the two of us, them or me, was actually the client. Before Christmas, El Corte Inglés, possibly the second most expensive department store in the world after Harrods, were given my watch to replace the leather strap. The watch itself is a reasonably expensive one, made by an Australian company better known for their good quality street and surf clothing, and, as such I was keen to replace the worn out strap with an original. I'll give 'em three weeks I thought and then pop by to collect it; after four further visits and countless telephone calls they called today to say it was ready. Thankfully I was sitting down when I picked the phone up. All excited, I went back this afternoon only to find the cheeky bastards had replaced the battery too and added another tenner to my bill. Now, I appreciate it was some time ago that they first had it, but I'm convinced it wasn't so long back the bleedin' battery would have conked out between times. Not only that, the lazy sods couldn't even be arsed to reset the time and date for me, which, when I collected it read August 2002.

I really want one of these

Obviously, any kind of whinge wouldn't really be complete would it without a bit of a dig at a mobile phone company, who, wherever you live in the world, just don't get Customer Service do they? I'm still waiting for my new smartphone, which is bound to be almost obsolete by the time Vodafone España eventually deliver it. I've known for ages that I'm not really much of a gadget freak in the way some blokes are, but, and it's an important but, when I order something, anything, I've really set my heart on I have to have it NOW!!  To make matters worse for yours truly, the girlyfriend ordered her new mobile at about the same time and it's been here four days. I think it's mighty impressive too because every quarter of an hour I get summoned to her side to "look at this" which I dutifully do whilst trying not to betray even the tiniest hint of jealousy. You'll need to trust me here when I say there's not much more frustrating than flicking through a Nokia user guide which runs to reams and reams of paper without being able to carry out their very detailed instructions on an acutal handset. When I've finished this I'm going to nip downstairs to the Orange shop next door to pick up their February brochure, just so I can remind myself what my new toy looks like.

Handy little flags

My personal award for utterly crap Customer Service has to go though to El Corte Inglés, obviously you'd expect Vodaphone and Telefonica to be completely and utterly shit and they rarely disappoint, but the sense of dismay I felt with Spain's flagship retail outlet was palpable. Putting their daft prices aside, the staff are usually kind and patient and some of them even have a little Union Jack badge to indicate they speak English, which is helpful sometimes. Thinking about it, I really shouldn't have been so facetious to the teenage shop assistant on my second to last visit when I sarcastically enquired whether I might spot my watch on eBay. Sorry señorita.