Waiting for Wifi

Chateau, Nemours

Have you ever wondered why mobile phone shops are always busy? To be honest it's not a question I'd given much thought to either - until this week. And perhaps they aren't where you live. Here in France though there is usually a queue winding around the shop and sometimes out of the door. Slow moving queues are not a novelty here as I've mentioned before. A coffee at a Macdonalds Express cafe might take 15 minutes, a train ticket 45, the supermarket checkout....well, just as long as it takes each and everyone in front of you to pack their purchases, find their purse/wallet, sort through their discount coupons, discuss their holidays (or worse, their health issues) and then perhaps decide to write a cheque. You just get used to it and mostly we don't mind. Buying a coffee, or a ticket or food shopping are all fairly straightforward purchases - we know what we want and we understand what it is and how to get it. Step through the automatic doors of the internet and communications outlet though and you enter a  world seemingly dealing in magic which no one, including the assistants, seems to understand. Hundreds of small halogen suns beat down from the ceiling reflecting off garishly coloured walls filled with the shiny gadgets that some of the customers in the queue want to buy. Others, like us, are clutching their previously purchased gadget and either don't understand how it works or want to know why it doesn't perform as promised. You can tell which customers are which. The halogens continue to light up the eyes of some despite the long wait for service but cause the others to slump in heat exhaustion.
Our problem was that the dongle which we purchased 2 years ago no longer worked. We took it to the fruitily named shop (not Apple) but they didn't know why. Come back with your laptop they said. Half hour trek to the boat and then queue up a second time. After trying all the things we had done previously, still no joy. Buy a new sim they said. We did. New sim, new account. Nothing.  After almost 3 (yes three) hours waiting and discussing ( my French, at least, is getting a good workout) and mucking around and doing our best to follow what was going on I heard the words 'system restore' (fortunately they are the same, it seems, in French). The technician intended reverting the lap top almost a year to when we'd last used the dongle. Non!!! Enough! Well, said the assistant, just take the sim and use it in your smartphone as a hotspot. The phone was on the boat. Another trek back again. Unsurprisingly, by now, that didn't work. Were they just trying to get rid of us? Back to the shop again the next day. By this time they were looking as happy to see us as we were to be there. In the end we gave up and bought their latest, new fangled portable wfi hotspot. It looks exactly the same as the cheap smart phone we have - in fact it's made by the same manufacturer. It's just not a phone. It works. But.....they didn't set it up quite correctly. Not being able to face up to another visit to the same shop we waited until the next biggish town, Nemours, and joined a new queue. Success - we think. Explaining the situation all over again to the new, and helpful, assistant his verdict on last year's dongle was it was 'just too old'. We just grew old in the queue.
Speaking of which :
this is the old abbey at Chateau Landon. It's now a rather spectacular retirement home.