How hard can it be?

Here we go again then.

Many of you will recall that eight years ago, when our family moved to the wilds of the Italian countryside, I had a great deal of trouble getting the phone connected—and that’s putting it mildly. (If you haven’t heard the story, may I refer you to this excellent book.) Whereas in Japan, land of technological progress and efficiency, there was to be no such carry-on. The plan was to arrive, take a week’s holiday, and then have a 21st-century super-fast broadband connection delivered to the door with a courteous bow shortly thereafter.

Once again, far too optimistic.

It turns out that in order to get optical fibre to my home, the local telephone company has to ask permission from the local power company to use their power poles. This procedure alone takes a month. Then they have to come along in their nice shiny truck and fit the nice shiny cables to the power poles and thread them all the way up to our house on the hillside and in through the walls of our house. This takes another month. So… two months. Two months without the internet! In this day and age! It’s like bloody Valfabbrica all over again (except this time there’s not even a grumpy landlord downstairs to lend me a phone line). I’ll have to pack my laptop up every day and drive over to the local internet café just to read my emails. Much less surf the internet or spend hours lovingly updating this site.

Now in the interests of journalistic integrity I should point out that I could, if I wanted to, get the phone connected within a week or so, if I were to apply to the national carrier NTT (the equivalent of Telstra in Australia or good old Telecom Italia in Italy). However this would be a vastly inferior ADSL connection, and I really really want optic fibre, mainly so I can boast about how fast it is. And, given my general dislike of national carriers, I can’t pass up the opportunity to thumb my nose at NTT. Also their charges are much more expensive. And last but not least, what really hooked me in was the name of the internet provider. They’re called… wait for it… MEGA EGG. How many people can honestly say that they’re connected to called Mega Egg?

I think it will be well worth the wait.