Waiting

We found ourselves in a queue today at the Starhub outlet at Vivo City. Forced to arrange a switch to fibre to receive our usual service, we've found it difficult to convince the company to come round and do the necessary for reasons that remain astonishingly opaque. Today we needed to provide proof that we do not inhabit business premises but actually live in an ordinary domestic apartment. You'd be surprised just how difficult it is to convince companies of this. It took us more than a year to satisfy Singtel that we're not a business, even though they were happily billing us as domestic users. Come to think of it, the billing thing is also true of Starhub.

As has regularly proved the case, as soon as we get to talk to an actual human being we are given a genuinely sympathetic listening ear. But when it takes over an hour for your queue number to appear, the irritation generated by just pointlessly waiting can seem close to overwhelming. But this is the way the modern world works and there's a wisdom in patience - and for making sure that you have a takeaway cup of tea with you as you sit there staring at the numbers. I do wish, though, that the air-conditioning in these outlets was a little less severe: I was freezing after 10 minutes.

By the by, the guy we eventually got to talk to was very helpful and it looks like we might have succeeded in convincing the company to keep on taking our money.