Telekom and Telecom

Whereas the mobile phone company Telecom in the States is a somewhat marginal enterprise, its mother, Deutsche Telekom is Germany's strongest player in the phone market. This has historical reasons for all telecommunication was once run by our national postal service. The Deutsche Reichs- later Bundespost was a giant running bank, mail, and telephone services - the latter two without competition - that accordingly were sometimes lousy.

However, Die Post was not always to blame. Since in the 1950s, the cable infrastructure could not keep up with the increasing demand for telephone lines, people sometimes had to wait "inline" for months before being lined up. With time this bottleneck disappeared, and our government decided to open up the telecommunication market to competitors. Still, people generally are lazy and remain true to their old provider. 

Returning to Germany following my thirty-two years in Switzerland, I had a free choice. For me, the reason to rejoin Deutsche Telekom was as follows: In 2000 it was the only company offering both telephone and internet services. In addition, even nowadays, Telekom still operates all hardware infrastructure that the new companies are exploiting too,

My relationship with Telekom was not without marital conflicts. The correspondence with my provider fills a thick ring binder. In particular, the speed of my internet connection is a permanent subject of dispute. My latest grievance was about a limitation in the number of e-mails I was allowed to send. When I tried to send messages to several groups, I sometimes got the following message: 550 5.7.1 Send quota exceeded, try again in 25436 seconds, which meant that I was OK again the next day. Still, this was annoying, so I had my contract with Telekom changed. For a modest monthly fee of 1.5 euros, they increased the size of my mailbox (which I do not need), but also raised my limit for sending e-mails to a number that I shall never even come close to.

Taken as a screenshot. You may not be able to read this.

So it came somewhat as a surprise that when I wanted to announce two new blogs to you the other day, I got the following message: 550 5.7.1 Send quota exceeded, try again in 4294967295 seconds. Since I did not want you to wait for more than a million hours, I called up Telekom's hotline.

And suddenly, I felt beamed back into the 1990s when on RTL television the comedians The Three with Their Caps (Die drei mit der [Telekom] Mütze) teased Telekom's lousy service and blunders. I spent nearly one hour in the line where they first told me that their colleagues had sold me the wrong product. That I denied, for I had read all the small print with the promise of a nearly unlimited number of e-mails to be sent. Talking to a second guy, he claimed they had simply forgotten to change my e-mail account to the new rate. A third person said that they had not done anything at all up to now.

The following morning I stepped into one of Freiburg's four Telekom local service points. It took the lady behind the counter half an hour to sort out the mess with the promise that everything would be in order in three days. And it was.

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