We moved to our new home on December 16, and a couple of days later left the sea of boxes behind to spend two weeks on the interrail trip in Europe (there will be another blog post on it). When back in early January we were hopeful of getting internet working quickly. After two weeks, we still don’t have its.

The short story is: the technician showed up on Monday morning and found out there is no telephone outlet (we don’t have a landline), and decided he needed to wire the fiber from the stairway cabinet to the apartment on the surface and then drill a hole for it on our door frame. For that he needed an authorization from ‘syndic’ (building management). In order to give the authorization ‘syndic’ needed ‘attestation d’assurance’ (some sort of insurance certificate) from the Orange’s subcontractor who does the installation. Orange promised to take care of everything and scheduled another technician visit.

The technician showed up on this Monday morning, spent 20 minutes looking for telephone outlets, and found none (well, I told him there’s none), and realized he needs to drill through the door frame to get the fiber to our apartment. He said he needed an authorization from ‘syndic’ to do that. I tried to explain in my limited French that we already went through this conversation with another technician a week ago, and I thought he now has the authorization. He was completely clueless and left us with no fiber. We faced ‘syndic’ and Orange again. Orange scheduled yet another technician visit for next Monday.

While all this exchange was happening, we had some very weird weather. Fronts with heavy rain accompanied with strong, gusty winds rolled over Vercors range to the town,

followed by bright sunshine.


And then the cycle started all over again: