Too Far Afield

The German version of ‘Mobile under Linux’ is now online.

Update (November 29, 2004):
This blog post was superseded by the article Online with a Debian Linux notebook and the Sony-Ericsson T610 mobile phone via Bluetooth long ago. I just forgot to update this post accordingly. Now I did. I would love to hear your feedback on the article, though. Tell me if it worked for you!

The former monopolist Deutsche Telekom AG, the main German provider for telecommunication services, operates serveral so called “T-Punkt”s (engl. t-points). These are simply stores where you can buy telephones and mobile devices or ask questions about your telephone contract.

Before the pink giant, as Deutsche Telekom is often reffered to, was privatised in about 1996, you were not allowed to install own telephone infrastructure in your own houses. You had to pay trained Telekom technicians for installing the infrastructure for you and you had to lease telephone devices from the Telekom. Only later you could buy your own devices in a store and install your own telephone infrastructure. Even today you are still not allowed to access the main telephone box of your house, which is officially owned by the Telekom.

Like many older people my grandmother bought a new phone only recently. Until fall of last year she still used a so called “Standardtelefon” device for which she paid the German Telekom an extra 1,50 EUR per month. When she bought her new device she put her old one into a cupboard and quickly forgot about it until she asked me a question about her telephone bill last week. When I noticed that she still paid money to the Telekom, although she didn’t use her phone anymore, I offered to return the phone. That offer was kindly accepted.

So I took the telephone device and the bill (for reference numbers that could have been needed) with me and appeared at our local “T-Punkt” waiting for “a friendly service employee” (from a German Telekom advertisement) to serve me. If it had been like it was in the ad’ I wouldn’t have waited for an employee in the first place, but I would have been served immediately. Unfortunately there were just three employees inside the store. One tried repleatedly to get his computer to take the account number of a couple with a nine-year old son who got his first mobile phone, the second employee tried to explain the benefits of bluetooth technology to an elderly person with stick and hat and the third one still had to serve three other people before he would be my “friendly service employee”. So I waited. When the third employee – an exception because he was about 35 years older than the other employees, I think he was about 60 years old, and because he weared a tie – finally looked at me his two collegues still were the “friendly service employees” of the same persons.

However, I felt lucky for being served at last and explained the matter to the guy in front of me. Still he had not said a single word. While maintaining an average face and leaning on the fashionable round table his computer was placed on with the one hand, he kindly stretched his other hand in my direction. I guessed that he wanted the telephone and placed both the device and the bill in his hand. He took both, first looked at the phone and then at the bill and went away into the deep catacombs of the store that were signed with “For AUTHORIZED T-Com personell ONLY”. After about three minutes he came back without the phone, brought the bill to a rest on the round table next to his computer and his body into an easy position in front of everything. Looking at computer and bill variantly he made a few clicks with his mouse and pressed a few keys on his keyboard. He then again used one hand to lean on the table while using his other hand to reach back to the printer, where his hand took a recently printed out paper and was then – again – kindly pointed in my direction. Again I guessed right and took the paper. But to finalize the whole thing, another guess was neccessary: “That was it?”, I presumed to ask. His face looked in my direction as if I had broken a secret law. For the first time his eyes looked into my eyes. He looked angry. “Hrm”, he grumbled. “Seems like I can’t manage to get a word out of his mouth…”, I thought, decided to blog about it later and left the store.

If you live in Hamburg, you should consider this alternative. Otherwise I think you’re stuck…

Recently my mother asked me to buy five bottles of maple sirup. That is because every year Aldi – a discounter famous for its low prices – offers the maple sirup for a limited time only and so my mother normally buys ahead. Being a helpful person, I went to the next store, got a whole box of sirup and stood in line for a cash desk. Although all cash desks were open, the line was long enough to fill almost the whole store. That however was nothing that made me wonder. Standing in long lines in small stores, giving way to elderly women and power moms who tried to squash in between the queueing people and the decks of boxes of the latest wendsday-morning offer to get some really important things they forgot to fetch earlier is almost normal at Aldi. What drove me nuts was a totally different thing. It was one of Müller Milch‘s advertising slogans. The slogan was roistered by a three or four year old, who could hardly speak. It was somewhere in the beginning of the line and it did not end: “… der Joghurt mit der Ecke, der Ecke mit ‘was drinn’ …”! Sorry, but in what society do we live that such a young child knows this slogan? Seems to be the new method to keep your kids calm. Just put ‘em in front of a tv and they will sing stupid commercials instead of getting on your nerves?

• Possible New York City subway photo ban.
• Positioning your services.
• Wikis: The new frontier for spammers? [via Jason Kottke]

In other news: Douglas Bowman redesigned.

• Biometric synergies will strengthen the war on piracy [via Heiko Hebig (com)]
• Clash over recently decided Mozilla Firefox standard design change
• Next generation “Pringles” will revolutionize the ad business. [via Jason Kottke]
• New Microsoft patent on double-clicks may threaten open source software [via Penguins]
• Die Bielefeld-Verschwörung (The Bielefeld Conspiracy)

As I’m quite busy right now (coding some additional features for the customer control panel of the company I work for) I’ve assembled just one link for our German readers. See you next week with some other great content.

Never forget where you’re coming from!

• Feuerwall [via Penguins]

Trackback for the rest of us!

• Phone terror the other way around [via Fray Storyblog]
• Celebrating D-Day anniversary: “Then we saw the coast of France”
• Wie deutsche Behörden gegen Hooligans vorgehen.

Nur für kurze Zeit: Amazon Deutschland berechnet keine Versandkosten für Bücher!