Back in the World

We were in the process of moving out of our Roquetas apartment. Experience told us that it took a long time to close or cancel a utility service contract. So we asked a gestoria (management company) to stop or transfer accounts for telephone, water, and electricity, to be effective immediately after we left the apartment.

Suddenly, Thursday noontime, May 7, a full day before we were due to close on our sale, and some hours before I had planned to write business and personal contacts to say that the time was now that we were making the move that had been in the works for months, it went black. There was no phone. There was no Internet.

There began 18 days of disconnection from my world. I already knew that I lived, professionally and personally, through the Internet. If I had not realized it before, I would surely know it now. Wi-fi spaces are few and far between in Spain, Internet cafés are open limited hours, and resort hotels are more interested in providing a sandy beach, pool, tennis or golf, proximity to the paseo, good restaurant service, and live entertainment than access to the Internet.

We moved temporarily (for a planned two weeks) to a gorgeous holiday apartment in Torrevieja, perfect in every way except no Internet or even land-line phone. During that time we spent four days in Madrid at a lovely reunion of engineering college classmates and their wives. But I could buy wireless in-room Internet access from Telefonica for a rather high 14€ (US$20) for a 24-hour period. Balancing the social life and the hours available, I was able to stretch 2 periods of access over the time I was there.

Back in Torrevieja, it turned out that our host's offer of using his office's network connection was his home office. Fine, except for the fact that my U.S. conference calls and meetings were scheduled from 8:00 PM until 11:00 PM Spanish time. Perhaps OK for the Spanish, but a little too intimate for a new acquaintance, and definitely too late for me to venture outside of my home-away-from-home to conduct business at that hour.

Because it had been reserved by others, we had to move out of our temporary apartment two days before moving into our new house, so we found a beautiful four-star, newly renovated beachfront hotel for two nights. You would expect Internet purchase options similar to those I found in Madrid, right? But no. I was invited to use one of the two desks in the lobby, for free, to connect via the wi-fi that was available in the lobby only. Again, would I want to conduct business in a public hotel lobby at 10:00 or 11:00 PM?

And then, two days before signing papers on the new house, we called to order the installation of broadband Internet service from Telefonica...only to discover that Telefonica could not guarantee accessibility in our nine-year-old, well-established "rural" area of 177 homes. This in spite of the fact that other residents already had Telefonica contracts for broadband.

Panic set in, but we located iAksess, a microwave provider, that promised to come and check the signal and then, it proving good, to place an antenna on our red-tiled roof to receive microwaves, and to install the wires down through the tiles and terraces and even behind the yucca and prickly cacti growing around the house. Thanks to the guys from iAksess, who spent the entire morning here, I am able to send this Sundays in Spain post from my new, connected office on Spain's Costa Blanca. And I feel as though I am back in the world again.