I woke up at around 8. At 8:53 I set off for the Ropice train station to get to Tesin, running part of the way. I got there with time to spare, and the train arrived about 5-10 minutes after I did. In Tesin I stopped by the post office, where the lady behind the counter looked as if she wanted to kill me with her stare – she gave me several horrible looks, almost the way a murderer looks at his victim.
There was someone ahead of me, and when they left she put up a sign saying I would be served at another counter. So I started to walk away, but then she called out that she would serve me after all.
I asked whether there was a parcel under my name (wow, it only just occurred to me that it is actually addressed to the company, so maybe that is why they always told me “NO”). I went home on foot and called Mom to say that if the post office came with the parcel, she should pay for it out of Lukas’s money and I would pay him back to the last crown at home.
Mom told me they were leaving for Ostrava shortly, so she would not be able to pick it up. So I kept walking, and only in Ropice did Dad pick me up. He said he needed to take photos of some house in Tranovice and its mailboxes. I asked him whether he would like to combine it with the trip to Ostrava.
He said yes, and that I could buy myself a baguette and so on. I did not want to argue with him, or he would have said that I could not even photograph one stupid house for them, and if I had suggested taking the photos and then going home, he would have complained that it was a pointless waste of money and diesel/money. So I just nodded along. We got home, and I had barely sat down at my laptop when we were already leaving. First we stopped somewhere in Stara Bela, where he bought some spare car parts.
But they did not have what he needed to get the ABS working. Then we popped into Tesco Extra in Hrabova, where I went straight to the O2 store. However, it was more of a Tesco shop with some O2 elements and advertising, because even the guy working there was wearing a Tesco T-shirt. I had to wait a while, since there was an old gentleman ahead of me, so at least I looked at the phone dummies – they only had mine (Nokia Lumia 710) in black and without a battery, so I will never know whether it was a dummy or a real phone :).
It looked nice and quite elegant even in black. Anyway, back to my problem: I needed to activate a voice and SMS plan there. I had already spoken with an operator on the hotline, who told me that the SIM card on which I had free internet could also be used normally in a phone, internet included. The local “O2 Guru” first tried to push contract plans on me, but when I insisted that I wanted a prepaid plan, he tried something on the PC and in the end told me to call *11, which was also a mistake, because I called right there in Tesco and they just transferred me to *88 – the line for prepaid customers.
There they told me that the voice plan was already active and I just needed to top up my credit. So I did, with the lowest possible amount of 200 CZK, but then I had a problem – I could not get to any website other than O2‘s. During that call in Tesco, the operator also told me that I should always call from the SIM card I want to do something with.
So at home I swapped the SIM cards and called – and this time I was told something completely different from what everyone else had said before: that the SIM card had been used in November last year, that I had to register within 2 months and then use it free of charge for those 6 months, so because I had not registered, the SIM card had expired. I will just point out that I really did use it for the first time in November, but that was during the 7-day trial, and the website itself told me that I was not yet in the 6-month period.
In FM we picked up my brother, who drove all the way home, and on the way back we stopped at Kokotek‘s (yes, that really is his name), who delivers the mail in Ropice 1. We had some envelopes for him that we had picked up in Frydek – somehow I had forgotten about that too :). I did not give up, and when my sister went to Tesin to the library, I popped into the post office (where a different lady behind the counter told me “NO”) and then into O2, which has just opened a new store on the square.
Fortunately, there was a real pro there, so I gave him the SIM card, he copied some information from it, and when I then offered him the modem, he plugged it into another PC and the internet “miraculously” started working. The only thing he told me was that since March 1 the terms had changed and that instead of a 500MB FUP per day I would have only 100MB (I hope that is also per day, even that would be pretty tight :D).