Stranger than Fiction

The internet has been down for so many personal accounts for the past month. Telecom Lesotho (the only ISP here) has been telling everyone that they have exceeded their download limit (26 gigs) and thus the internet has been shut off. This, of course, is ridiculous, as it's almost impossible to download that much given the speed of internet here. You'd basically have to sit home all day and do nothing but download massive files. But even still, I don't think anyone could really do that.

Today Josh went to the Telecom office to try and get things straightened out. They, naturally, told him that the excuse from above. So he asked if instead of just shutting off the internet, could they provide a service whereby they contact the user to warn them beforehand. And this is classic...

The response Telecom gave was: "Oh, we do provide that service. We email the user when we've shut off the internet." Uh...what? So you email the client who is unable to log-into their account. Brilliant!

But wait, it gets better. When Josh asked which email address they sent our message to, they said bulesotho@itmail.co.ls. Hmmm, sounds plausible that we could possible have that as an email address. Except, nope, we don't. So Josh asked where they got that from, and this is the best part. Telecom said "Well, our system makes us enter an email address, and since we didn't know what yours was, we made it up."

I nearly died laughing when he told me that story. That's not something even the best fiction writer could create!
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This past weekend Gillian, Jesper and I hiked Cathedral Peak in the Central Drackensbergs. It was amazing! 4200' of elevation gain, 20 km, great views. It was the first "real" hike I've done here, and with my lungs full of stuff (I got a pretty good chest cold last week), I was definitely breathing hard.

Today is a busy work week as usual. The Quality Teams are going great and I have to run a training for survey data collection. Writing contracts, designing methodology, leading groups, and having a professional blast!