It ain’t all bad…

But they want you to think it is. Case in point: the parking situation. Owning a car in any European city is an expensive proposition – they don’t really want you to drive here, so they make it expensive. We understand. We don’t really want to drive here, but we do need the car for long trips and Ikea runs, so we need a place to park it.

A 1-day parking permit is €15.90, yeeowch. So you apply for a resident’s parking permit, and at the office they told DrBob that if he had a Dutch registered car they could just give him the permit right then, but since he was Johnny Foreigner, he’d hear from them in a week. A week later, so around September 9th, we got a letter saying they’d reach a decision by October 29th, and our faces fell off. €15.90 a day for almost two months, that’s um, times three, times ten, plus another… that’s a LOT OF MONEY! Yeah we freaked. FREAKED, I tell you. Acting on a tip from a neighbor, we found a place, a 10-minute walk away, where there’s free parking on one street, wedged the car in (because everybody else knows about this street too), and left it there. And tried not to worry that they’d change the parking rules while we weren’t looking. After another week we get a letter, your permit’s ready you can pick it up on Monday. All that outrage, for nothing!

The internet was the same thing – we signed up for KPN’s internet + TV + phone deal, and they sent us a letter saying thanks for choosing us, we should have you up and running in 20 workdays! And we’re all, ch… pf… kfsk…WHAT?! That’s 30 days! Auuuuuugh! So we bought one of those instant-internet USB thingies, and carefully rationed internet time, because we thought we had to make 50 Mb last a month, and then two weeks later, spling! It’s all up and running.

They are clearly trying to drive us crazy.

Song du jour of the day: Do You Wanna Date My Avatar, by the Guild.