lioness in japan

Apart from buying a piece of glass (thinking it was a bench) and going through the nightmare of applying for an apartment, I think Tokyo hasn’t been too harsh on me. I always feel lucky that I can read most kanji and even enjoy getting reacquainted with Mandarin, my mother tongue, which has gone rusty from lack of use.

But sometimes, I would feel like I’m a two-year-old pretending to be an adult. This moment came every time I sent in a new application form for a telephone land line. In all, I have sent six forms. They were rejected because they were either filled in wrongly or the telephone company claimed they didn’t receive it. The last form was also exactly the same as the first one we filled in that wasn’t successful. What the hell was going on? Well, the ordeal is finally over and we got our phone.

Ironically, the kangaroo is not around to use it because the idea of the land line was an alternative to unstable Skype calls and mobile phones. It was also cheaper on the wallet as overseas calls on a keitai are astronomical. And I’m also predicting that I would feel miffed when I might have to return this adaptor unused because the kangaroo will tell me we are moving to another country after his round-the-world job hunt.

Anyway, back to my story: I have a strong feeling that most Tokyoites have a land line in the office and just use their keitais at home, so I concluded it was a phantom service that no one really knew how to apply for. Even my hapless Japanese teacher despaired over helping me fill in every one of those five forms.

The last one was done by the kangaroo’s sensei but I lied to mine saying we got a friend to do it for us. I really didn’t want her to feel inadequate. I figured that a sixty-year-old lady wouldn’t know much about technology and many things probably got lost in translation.

Here are the myriad of problems I think that went on:

The credit card holder’s name didn’t match the applicant’s name. In Singapore you could apply for a service but get your parents or sister or husband or SOMEBODY to pay for it. Well, I should’ve known that in Japan, that would be too risky. This mistake got us rejected thrice.

Filling up the wrong form.The several other forms I filled in were probably the wrong ones as the last application got what we wanted. I have no idea what my Japanese teacher thought I wanted — we just wanted a telephone, not a keitai, just a phone, not broadband, just one phone.

Bad handwriting in Japanese. I think the smudges and messy corrections didn’t help the process. Maybe they mistook a troll trying to get a phone.

Long turnover time. We were supposed to wait three weeks for the phone adaptor to arrive after submitting the form. If the phone adaptor didn’t arrive after a month, I would get my sensei to call customer service and they would give us some excuse why it wasn’t approved, and then I would start the whole application process again. Since we got it wrong five times, we had to wait six months to get it sent.

Mismatched account numbers. It got so tedious that even the customer service staff told us to apply through their website because it would go into their system immediately (but we would still have to wait three weeks for the adaptor to arrive). Also, we needed a username and password to log into their application form link — and we didn’t have one because we weren’t customers yet. Then it came to light that we were already registered but under our landlord’s account! So the last form was successful because it was tagged onto his present broadband account. Apparently our address and customer account number had to match so our application didn’t go through because we were trying to be new customers when we weren’t (Are you still with me? If you are, congrads!)

On the bright side of things, I chanced upon an excellent script for making reservations at a ryokan (traditional Japanese inn). Bikurishita (What a surprise)!

I used to dread making hotel reservations over the phone because I was never very good at dates (but I am working hard on this) and I simply had no idea what they were saying 70% of the time. Now with the dialogue in front of me, I can finally understand what was gibberish before! It was all clouded in honorific and humble forms (which have three times more characters which do not sound at all like their root verb)!

A Singaporean friend is coming to holiday in Japan soon and she needs help in making reservations for the Kyoto leg of her trip. No fear, I won’t mess it up this time.

Related posts:

1. I had to face the horror of losing my house keys…
2. A spot of home improvement
3. Found a little tree house in Harajuku

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