The Mañana Heroes

Hah, check it out: I have internet at home again. I have been hoping, of course, but I wasn’t holding my breath on this one. I know I keep repeating it, but this is Spain. I guess you have to see it to believe it: you need a serious amount of good humour to survive over here…

It took repeated calls to the national telephone company over the last few weeks just to get my name into their system. They’re the only company, by the way, so the concept of customer service is completely lost on them: you don’t like it? Then good luck to you. No hay problema, they kept saying, someone will contact you in three to four weeks. But how exactly that someone would contact me was a mystery, because I kept disappearing from their system. I was starting to feel like that little tape at the beginning of Mission: Impossible: “This tape will self destruct in five seconds…”. It just wasn’t happening.

Then last night an operator called me and had a ball torturing me for five minutes in her high speed Spanish. Más despacio, por favor, I kept pleading with her. But either she was so over excited to break the good news to me, or she found a good way to make her job more fun. In the end, she just dropped the phone on me. Nice. I picked up two conflicting messages from her: one was ‘by the first of March’, to which I almost replied, of what year? Luckily I had the good sense to bite my tongue. But the other word was mañana, a very loaded word in these parts. The literal translation, as you probably know, is tomorrow. But in reality it suggests a vague and fluid concept that can mean anything from the next day to three or four months from now. Still, call it intuition, but I went to bed feeling rather hopeful.

This morning at around ten thirty, two (rather cute!) men showed up. By ten forty-five I was trying to connect…with success, as you can see. Bloody amazing! And I realised these guys have pinned down the true essence of customer service: keep expectations as low as you can, and you’ll always come out a hero.