Int'l Tech... Not so much.

Hi from London’s, Heathrow. I am on my way to Kenya and made the unfortunate error of expecting my Sprint phone to work internationally. You know, the Blackjack that I switched to so that I could use it overseas. I had it switched on for Int’l when I was in Egypt and India over the summer, but now it appears to have been switched off. I have tried for the better part of two hours to make a call to Sprint to enable my int’l roaming. Those BT payphones are impressive steel boxes. And they take credit cards! But the Sprint support number is an 888, and BT doesn’t want to connect a toll free call to the US. It could cost them, gosh, I’d say 12 cents or so. It’s a lot like banging your head against a brick wall.. only the bleeding is all internal.

Then I spent another hour trying to get wifi here at the airport, which is a lot like trying to go somewhere with one of your feet screwed to the floor. Oh the circles I’ve walked and the places I’ve seen! I cleverly, so I thought, signed up for T-mobile’s hotspot service at JFK in New York ($5 for 24 hours, which I thought was a tremendous bargain). But their guarantee to “be there” for me in 30,000 hotspots around the world was less than ironclad. Apparently London is just too small of a city for them to accommodate my membership. I was able to get to their website via their wifi here, but that was as tantalizingly close as they would allow. After rejecting my login 29 times, they suggested I load their software. Dutifully, I obliged, but no dice. So I tried something called, paradoxically, BT Open-net. “Open” as in, say, Burma. Or North Korea. I am sure everything will work much better in Africa. But at least the English Breakfast still worked. Sausage, bacon, eggs, mushrooms, tomato and that somewhat salty, toasty taste of instant coffee.

But! Finally I am on, via some service called the Cloud. Nine Pound and ninety-nine p for 24 hours, but what’s a traveler to do? You gotta have internet access so that you can log on to Sprint’s International support page, so that you can find out – much to your continuing amusement - that they are there for you. Um, that is, from 7 am Central to 7 pm Central. Hello? Earth to the American Midwest… please refer back to your 2nd grade geography text… you know, that chapter about time zones.

I am giving the whole international communications infrastructure a C -. Does anyone else find it odd that I can get online in my country and secure a new mortgage, buy a car, organize my funeral, even get simple instructions on how to perform surgery at home… yet staying connected from Fort Collins, to New York to London requires an advanced degree in network programming?