It took almost two months, but we are finally settled in our new house just outside Barcelona. The hardest part was having the ADSL installed. When the phone company called after two days of requesting the service to set up the appointment for a technical guy to come and install the fiber optics, I could not believe how easy it was going to be. I should not have counted my chickens just yet! The engineer came late, he assessed the situation and the easiest way to install the service it appeared to be via the neighbours’ garden; only there was nobody in. So with my Spanish not quite up to speed I agreed to call the engineer, who gave me his mobile number, in the morning to agree a suitable time to complete the work. It all seemed so easy! Instead when I called him in the morning he said I was not on his list anymore and I should call the phone company to see what had happened to speed things up.

It turned out that the job was put on hold because the engineer had put on file that the neighbours would not grant permission; I very calmly explained the situation that there was no problem whatsoever with the neighbours because they so kindly left me the garden key to let the workers in whenever they came. Fine, they said, we’ll be in touch shortly! And they did call me a day later or so asking if the neighbours would grant permission, I explained there had been a misunderstanding along the way and that I already explained I had the keys. Fine, they said, we’ll call you in 24 hours. They did call only to ask the same thing again. By this point my Spanish had got a lot better – the one good thing that came out of all of this mess – and I got mad. Not to worry, they said it is all sorted now and the engineer would call in 48 hours. He did call and my arms dropped when I realized it was the same guy as last time, who very clearly tried to get himself out of a job which was not straight forward, which in the end took him a couple of hours to do and was quite physically demanding as it involved going up ladders to bring the cable in and so on. It took three weeks longer than we originally thought, but we got there in the end plus I got to practice my Spanish along the way.