2002/3/14

One day, I decided to lay a new another telephone line because I wanted to use the line for only Internet. Then I made a call to the biggest telephone company in Australia. This company is like the "NTT" in Japan.
A staff asked my details included my name, address, etc. to register into the system. Basically customers must wait at least five working days to lay a new telephone line without medical considerations.
Then she told me the cost to install and time to come to my place. I repeated after her and wrote down the time and cost to double check. At last, I asked her name because I don't like that if something happens. She told me her first name and the place she called from.
Of course I wrote down those too.
I was waiting for a technical staff the day I promised. However no staffs appeared. I was so angry and called to the company soon to reconfirm about it.
Then a staff said, "Your appointment is next week.” "What?" I said. But I didn't care about it so much at this stage. Because I took a note of her name and the place she was when I contracted with. So I said, "When I made a call to contract, I got a staff name and the place she was at that time.
Her name is "Rebekah" from Adelaide.”
Then she suddenly asked me, "Rebekah who?”
??? Rebekah who?
Of course I didn't know because it's not usual things, right?
When you ask a staff name in Japan, do you ask his/her first name?
If you do, the staff must be scary.
Anyway I said, "I don't know."
Then she said, “I’m sorry. If you don’t know, we cannot do anything. You’ve got to wait until next week.” I was so mad and explained again and again, but they didn’t handle it in the end. Can you believe it? When I read a newspaper in a few day after this matter, an article happened to my attention and I was shocked so much. The article summary was the following.
A family that has an asthma child moved to a rural area and wanted to have telephone line installed as soon as possible to contact with hospitals or call ambulance just in case. She called the telephone company to ask staffs to install it quickly. But they refused to do it soon nevertheless the customer explained about their child. She called six times to do it, but they refused again and again. Unfortunately, suddenly their child condition was bad and he was dead because they couldn’t call. This is Australia. It happened like this in the real world. Does this happen in Japan? Have you ever heard like this in Japan? I would like you to think about this matter. This must be only one corner of an iceberg.