I woke this morning at 2.30 am with about ten complex questions in my mind – all relating to just one entity, my phone/internet/TV provider (the Australian telcho giant Telstra).

1. Phone/mobile/Internet/TV provider

You see, we’re switching from Australia’s #2 telcho provider – Optus – and this holiday-month of January is the time we’re supposed to seamlessly move from one to the other. Fortunately their stores are next to one another at our local supermarket (Ringwood Eastland) and I’ll – again – be taking the journey from one to the other, mainly to check that both telchos are not charging me for the same service.

So far just about everything that can go wrong has done so.

* Someone fiddled with our lounge-room TV, and we lost our Foxtel content. That required 35 minutes of experimenting led by someone on the other end of the phone – with poor English – in Bangalore India. At the end of the session he suggested something which should have come first: ‘press the Source button on your handset’. After a bit of experimenting: bingo!

* Then we lost our home-phone connection. A competent technician came within a few days and took an hour to fix it, locating relevant wires in our roof, climbing a ladder a couple of times up a street telephone pole, and finally putting the main phone connection into a different ‘jack’.

* ‘The new modem for your internet connection will be posted to you’ said another Indian voice: you connect it yourself.’ ‘No you don’t’, said an Australian voice on another call: someone will come to your home to connect it’. After a bit of date-juggling during this holiday-period, someone will visit us next Friday afternoon: ‘be home between 1pm and 5 pm.’

So… at precisely 8.50am today I will line up with about a dozen other hopefuls at the Telstra store in our local mall, and at 9 am ask a Telstra employee to unravel these ten questions.

Some of them:

* We learned that we don’t have to use one of the Telstra mobiles they want to sell us: so I’ll be taking the three left-over but functioning Samsung mobile phones from our previous accounts.

* Jan and I don’t want to use our mobile phones for internet stuff, only calls and SMSs: so how do we configure a package that factors in that variable? We also need to have voice-messages recorded telling folks to text us rather than leave a voice message…

* To pay the bills we need to set up a system: so that the most appropriate credit-card handles it all (with a levy of 1%) to save me doing it manually each month. The first bill (I thought it was the first) came the other day with a $6 surcharge for ‘late payment’ (which means I must have got another in one of the dozen emails sitting in a special Telstra folder).

* Seeing Telstra has the best 4G coverage how does this impact our mobiles, iPad, iPod?

* There’s more: but the most important one: ‘Is this plan the best in terms of value-for-our-hardearned money?’

Worthwhile visit. Paid the first Telstra bill, added a thingo to the iPad to connect me with 4G. (Now how to configure the iPad to make sure we use Wifi for everything within range, and save the expensive 4G option when out of range of wifi. Think I’ve managed that.

To do: eliminate a TV with access to Foxtel which we don’t use much, to save $35 (?) a month.

2. Carer’s help.  Jan’s been in 6-8 hospitals in the last year and a half for various treatments associated with her aggressive uterine cancer. In the last week four procedures (ultrasound etc.) at Knox Private Hospital to figure out why her stomach is seriously bloated.

Got a call back from Centrelink (132 717) and they’ll post some forms, to be submitted by Jan. 28, backdated to today 14/1/2015. What kind of help do I give to Jan? Some dressing (especially shoes), all driving, some showering, shopping, etc.

Also contacted Uniting Home Help – 9239 2500. Help maybe for housework, as it’s getting too much for Jan: especially vacuuming. Jan can still do ironing, and some cooking, provided it doesn’t necessitate her being on her feet for too long.

More to come… And also some of the other Systems we’re involved in at the moment.

Rowland Croucher

January 12, 2015