Expect the Unexpected!

[Ann]

When I bought a flat right on the border between Germany and Austria (as a friend of mine puts it, Austria is 3 fields to the east) I thought I had the best of all worlds. What I hadn't considered was that it could cause havoc with phones.

When I'm at the flat I have my British mobile, a German one and a dongle which gives me a dial-up connection to the Internet. (I don't have a landline.)

My English mobile can't seem to tell the difference between Austria and Germany at all, but clearly prefers Austria as it seems to spend most of it's time thinking it's there. It doesn't actually matter as I pay the same if I use it to phone or text the UK either way.

My German mobile, with a certain amount of honour at stake, gets it right most of the time, but not all of the time. This is dangerous as I'm on a monthly tarif where I pay a small amount for a certain amount of talk time and a certain number of text messages, but only when I'm in Germany. Cross the border and the deal doesn't work. Not checking where the phone thinks it is before I make a call can be very costly as I found out when I had an extended conversation with a German friend and discovered later that, instead of costing me nothing, I'd been charged £15!

My dongle behaved itself admirably until last week. Out of the blue, both dongle and German mobile decided they were in Austria. They were sitting on the coffee table in the flat at the time. I put them in my pocket, got on my bike and cycled due west. I had limited time that day as a friend was coming to stay the following day and I was busy preparing, so couldn't go too far. Neither phone nor dongle budged. (Perhaps instead of stopping for coffee, apple strudel and cream I should have carried on cycling!) Two days later, my friend and I headed north west to some shops, me with dongle and phone in my bag. Still no joy. The day after that we were visiting friends an hour's drive away from the border so I took not only the dongle and phone, but the laptop too. After 4 days of no internet, I finally got my connection back.

One good thing has come of it, I've now worked out how to tell which country the mobiles think they're in.

[SaffiandJasmin]

It's not just there that there's a problem...although it doesn't affect bills or anything like that, but sometimes when I post online I have been placed as Harrow, Slough, Windsor, Wealdstone and Staines....all from my PC in the same room. Where am I??

[Ann]

How do you tell where your computer thinks you are?

On similar but yet completely different lines, when I hear a foreigner speaking German, I can usually tell if they're English, French or Russian for example because they speak with the accents from those countries. Talking to my German friends, they can't. They can hear that the person isn't German, but not which country they're from. This explains why, at different times, I've been asked if I'm American, Dutch and Swiss! Never once has anyone identified me as British.

[SaffiandJasmin]

That's because they don't expect Brits to speak another language!!!! I can tell re the computer because if I post something on certain sites, it adds my 'location'... but usually gets it wrong! x

[Ann]

May 1, 2014 14:21:41 GMT SaffiandJasmin said:

That's because they don't expect Brits to speak another language!!!!

That did cross my mind too! My spoken German is pretty rusty these days, although it's beginning to improve a bit and at least my comprehension is good. What's very encouraging is that no one immediately breaks into English even when they establish that's my first language.