Post photo: phone booth | © Acatana on Pixabay
This is a love, life and suffering story and for that reason alone it could be a bit longer today. I can't say where this blog post will ultimately take me. My readers know that I write spontaneously and without a double bottom.
This post was triggered by my unavoidable phone calls yesterday with very friendly Telekom employees and a visit to a Telekom shop, where I was again lucky enough to meet the person responsible for the shop, whom I appreciate for his competence and commitment.
I had delayed these said phone calls for as long as possible, but in the end they were necessary, because my Telekom Media Receiver 401 had been broken for a while, and when I mean broken, I really mean broken, really Telekom-dead. And how do I even know this? Telekom customers know what I mean, because I had previously not only unplugged the media receiver several times, but also restarted my router umpteen times and also checked all the existing cables and especially the mesh devices.
However, loyal Telekom customers now know very well that Telekom-dead is only Telekom-dead after you have gone through the whole thing again — at least once — together with a friendly Telekom employee.
Readers who are a bit more tech-savvy are probably wondering why a Telekom Media Receiver is still there at all? A good and completely justified question that my two sons have been asking me for years and that I gave up dealing with Telekom for a very long time — simply because Telekom thinks that something like this is needed.
So, my media receiver had to be dead-voiced and I picked up the phone and reached for the usual telecom bots which, against my best intentions, once again managed to drive me insane and I only passed the bot test, because my better half was there with the necessary documents, a friendly Telekom employee. Whoever communicates with Telekom needs paper, everything else is hopeless!
The first employee of the day was the right one right away, because the joint death-talking went very quickly by Telekom standards. I also booked my replacement device very quickly.
To my absolute surprise, I had not only a friendly, but also a qualified employee on the line. During the conversation, he admitted that you no longer needed a media receiver and that, like the other services I use, I would only have to import a corresponding media receiver app onto my television set. He even offered to cancel the replacement device.
As experienced in telecoms as I am, I agreed with him that I would first install the app, see if it works and then get back to him or one of his colleagues to cancel the replacement device. It was also agreed that I would personally hand in the old receiver to the Telekom shop, as I wanted to buy two more mesh devices there independently.
Less than 5 minutes later my Telekom app was running and I packed my media receiver. Before I made my way to the Telekom shop, I called Telekom again and since the documents were still on the table, I passed the Telekom bot fairly quickly and caught the next friendly employee. We very quickly agreed that he knew the existing process and that I now only had to cancel the replacement delivery. He canceled the replacement delivery and then pointed out to me that I still needed documents from him in order to be able to return the old receiver to the Telekom shop. He then asked me if I had a printer handy and I should have known right away! Long story short, I said yes and he emailed me a QR code.
When I arrived at the Telekom shop, I immediately caught my favorite Telekom employee and immediately checked the availability of a faster Internet and reassured myself that I would be informed as soon as Telekom was able to offer modern Internet access . Unfortunately, I still have to deal with up to 50 MB, but he assured me that I could get a chance for a fiber optic connection in about 2 years.
Then I bought two mesh devices and gave away my media receiver. I showed him the “required” QR code and he assured me that this would only be necessary if I wanted to give the media receiver to Deutsche Post. Now the request made by the friendly employee before made sense, because he was probably still convinced that Deutsche Post and Telekom are still one and the same shop and he also knew his colleagues there and therefore knew very well that they only be able to do something with printed QR codes.
In any case, I received a written confirmation of receipt of my old device from the friendly employee of the Telekom shop and the assurance that Telekom and I are currently riding a common wave again.
This morning I received a friendly SMS from Telekom that my new media receiver was on its way to me and that I could probably expect delivery in a few days thanks to Deutsche Post. Another text message asks me to give Telekom's service a good rating.
You can only endure such madness if, like me, you have been married to Telekom for decades. Admittedly, I had my best times when I was still working with other telecommunications companies and my servers are still running at 1und1 or Ionos, as this company is currently called. And as long as I transferred a large part of my monthly income to Telekom for work-related reasons, I was even one of their premium customers.
This relationship started with today's Telekom as a forced marriage, since in the early years of our republic it was correctly assumed that infrastructure is a state task.
Admittedly, the German "authority administration" was no longer up to date with our infrastructure, at least to be able to keep up with other countries. It would have been better if the German system of authorities had been revised and constantly reformed. But the decision was made to sell off one part of our infrastructure after the other and thus make certain groups rich.
In the end, however, the authorities were not abolished, but only companies switched in between, whereby the larger companies were allowed to keep their authority DNA.
All the benefits that we citizens actually feel are primarily due to technological progress and not to the privatization of infrastructure. The privatization of the infrastructure alone has only meant that we citizens have to pay more and more for it, it is now crumbling everywhere and we will probably only have a fiber-optic-based Internet 50 years later than our responsible authorities originally had was targeted.
So the hope remains that I will be old enough to at least be able to experience the technology that was developed in my youth. In the meantime, a kind of forced marriage has actually turned into a convenience marriage, because we both know what we have in each other, and I don't want to have to get used to someone all over again. And now and then I even get into reveling, e.g. B. when I think of my days with the payphones — although it took a long time before Telekom was also able to make collect calls. Then I got my first landline phone — a Mickey Mouse — or my futile efforts at Telekom to get my first mobile phone, which was still heavily on the A network trip at the time and that was clearly far too expensive for me. Then later my constant struggles to really get the latest Communicator or my first iPhone, whereby the Telekom employee really wanted to talk me into getting a Telekom smartphone. Which ultimately led to me buying my own phones ever since.
Since Telekom has also foisted RTL on me in the contract and has also constantly wanted to sell me more sports or other sleazy apps, I no longer believe that the marriage of convenience mentioned will turn into a love marriage.
Rather, it is now a mutual stalk, namely about who will survive whom. My time on earth is of course limited, which unfortunately cannot be said of telecommunications companies. Although these are already completely obsolete given the current state of technology, nobody cares about us, especially not decision-makers.
It would be so easy, even across Europe, a single authority with a maximum of 150 employees could ensure that every household has a fiber optic connection and that mobile Internet is fully available. This authority would only have to entrust appropriate companies with the construction and maintenance of the cables and masts and the operation of the network. We citizens would only need to buy an appropriate device, which then dials into the Internet free of charge; We pay for the "operation of the Internet" like really all other infrastructure things with our taxes.
But that would be far too easy, would also free up a lot of our lifetime for more important things and also save us a lot of nerves. Just returning and booking out the new media receiver will definitely cost me half a day again!
But we can assume that as soon as the majority of the population realizes that certain things are actually not needed, our state will nationalize all telecommunications companies, combine them into a monster authority and then regulate this monster authority in Germany alone through 17 newly created super ministries.
One day this will certainly anger quite a few citizens and the decision-makers will then come up with a completely new idea and privatize "the Internet". New "telecom companies" will emerge, which will then mediate between future generations and the Monster Authority for a fee. And by the way, the future citizens will certainly want to turn on a completely new media receiver.
"There are revolutions that make the world more complicated, and there are revolutions that make the world easier. And there are revolutions that make the world easier in a complicated way. That includes the phone.”
Christian Kämmerling, Die Weltwoche (August 28.8.2003, XNUMX)
