Dongles, Bangles, Bright Shiny Beads

So today was to be the day when we were going to see Liz get her Internet up and running. We planned it since last week to go to the SFR store in St. Amand, purchase a SFR/Vodaphone Dongle and sign her up for a 2 year stint with 3G iNet service (aka 2G internet slow service) and that would be that.
Not so easy there poopsie, first they wanted her passport...? huh? Why a passport, who knows but it was a no go without one so we took a round trip BACK to Lignieres to get it. Once signed up, the dongle was inserted by the wonderful SFR stewardess to no effect! That's right, it inserted the software alright but it did not wish to connect! What? Right, SFR itself couldn't make the dongle dangle , jangle and ring bells. Nonetheless, we accepted the proposition that it WOULD work once we got to Liz's and fired it up. So off we went to the Le Massilia just down the street when we discovered that La Pizz was closed. Lunch was nice, service was surley but effective and the bill was relatively low and Liz paid which was dear thanks for the help getting me online. Sure. Maybe. We drove back to her house outside of Lignieres where last week the little machine with my very own SFR dongle had found and connected to a 2G SFR network signal. We sat down with the fine Dell laptop with Windows XP installed and inserted the dongle and double clicked on the SFR icon. Up pops the SFR Banner quickly followed by a connection window. Down near the bottom in tiny print it says Periferique 3g Non Connected...and that's the way it remained when I moved outdoors in the dripping drizzle to check the signal. Blink, blink but no solid connection lite was forth coming. I fiddled and frustrated myself for another half hour to no good effect. Sooo, we wrapped it all up and the last we saw her at 4pm she was off to the nice SFR person to fix the problem with her dangling Dongle. Further she was to return to our abode to report on the results of the return visit. It is now 5:50 since we left her.

The Blessing

well here i am typing on an asus pceee netbook being held in one hand while i peck away with the other on the &��&'( French keyboord, so fun. How did we get to this point, you might ask. Well France Telecom cut us off boopie, cold of them, no? I thought so too but given we ran out of money in our account that they draw their payment from, no wonder. The problem was less that they cancelled us exactly 10 days after the 10 day warning but that they told us that we could not even apply to have new service for 2 to 3 weeks! What? And poopsie, 96 Euros had to change hands before that would happen. They wouldn't let us pay right then even. So that was that. We paid up our past due amount and accepted our lowly status as France Telecom deadbeats and thought of that far off day when we could get connected again to the universe.

A day or two later upon going to our friends A&R,s place, A asked if I knew anything about the telephoney dongle things. Huh? Nope...what is it? She gave me a quick rundown and my mind, busy with the recent France Telecom debacle, perked right up! We vowed to sort this out for ourselves and find out what else might be possible in the line of broadband connections in our dear France.

The next day we were off to Bourges to shop the dongle department in good, ol' Darty. The salesman, techie showed us the 3G SFR and Orange dongles for using cell phone suppliers signals as broadband access. We were stoked! How much? Well... at first the deals sounded poorly, any more than what we had paid at FT was deemed to be too much but soon the figure of 50 Euros a month unlimitted came to light and Ted said he'd cover it! That seemed overly generous so we told him we'd split it with him. Then an astounding announcement came from the salesman, it was a package deal with an ASUS PC Eee netbook thrown in the deal for an additional 130 Euros! Further, it was with SFR, another carrier and the monthly unlimitted deal was only 32 Euros! Wow! After a visit to the nice lady who wrote everything down on her computer and we were delivered the tiny laptop that isn't we were off to home, dinner and a session on the internet as fast as I could unwrap the dongle from it's impossible packaging, plug it in and do the first timers dance with technology that we all go thru time and time again. This was particularly EASY, as the software was contained in the dongle itself and soon it began to blink in good dongle fashion
and l'viola! we were ON! Amazing...and s-l-o-w as molasses in January but at least we can get our emails, surf the net and decide on some other way to watch movies or tv shows as this speed will not allow those activities. It is hardly BROADBAND, more like NARROWBAND-AID but at least it's NOT France @#$#@#@! Telecom the bane of our existance online and of our bank account! A Blessing indeed!