BurbleChaz

Up bright and early, and off to the bank. We got there as they were opening the doors and were first in the queue. The bank cheerfully relieved us of $20 for two bank (guaranteed) cheques, and we bimbled to The Place Of Employment. At about tennish, we pottered down to Swanson Street and caught a tram to the Estate Agent's office in South Yarra.

We arrived about half an hour early, but they had all the paperwork ready. We handed over a vast quantity of money and received a heap of paper in return. We'll pick up the keys on Friday

We have placed our utility connections in the hands of an agency who promise to do it all for us. Their service is free. They operate on kickbacks from the utilities. This may not be entirely in our interest, but we thought it wold be better than dealing with all the utilities ourselves.

Most of this should be straightforward, except the telephone connection. The National Phone Company is going to charge us $300 to connect us. It's a one-time charge for the apartment, so I assume that this is the fee to plug in a pair at the DP. This is a huge apartment block. All the drops should be connected at the DP. If the line quality isn't good enough, fire the build contractor. Or charge each tenant $300 for work that's already been done. That's cool, too. The local monopoly is largely government owned. We neither need nor want their service. However, we can't get a data connection without a physical copper connection from them.

The Incumbent Local Loop Owner would love to sell us a data connection. For $100 a month, they can give us 1.5Mb down, 128Kb up. If you exceed your monthly allowance, they throttle you to 64Kb for the rest of the month. Joy.

Once we've got a copper connection for $300, the first thing we're going to do is cancel it. I bet they charge us for it.

Before we get that far, we have to get connected. They won't do that unless we're in the apartment. So, at least half a day is going to be wasted hanging around for someone to turn up and tell us the pair is already connected at the DP.

Grrrrr. Profound dislike of large organisations.

On the plus side, pie for lunch. No day is ever entirely wasted.