It's all good

Our glamorous new modem

Well, mostly good. The man from the phone company arrived this morning, right on schedule, and quickly hooked up our new internet and wifi line.

Future site of the lavatrice and asciugatrice

Then the plumber dropped by late this afternoon and ascertained that everything we want him to do, including moving the washing machine and dryer from the back someday-second-bathroom to an alcove in the existing bathroom, is eminently doable and will be done sometime next week, possibly even Monday.



Romano even tracked down his friend the painter and it sounds like we might be able to get the kitchen painted before Ikea arrives with all the mobili. Then he can do the rest of the place while we're not here in May.

The one disappointment is that the SIM card that came with our new Vodafone package can't be used in a cellphone. What you can use it for is a mystery that not even Pam was able to crack, despite poring over the reams of warnings, instructions, and legal hoo-ha that came with our new modem/router.

The reason this matters is that just about everything in Italy seems to require having a mobile phone. We first realized this when we arrived a couple of weeks ago and discovered that the PIN on our Italian bank's ATM card was no longer valid. When we went into the bank to get a new PIN, they asked for a cell-phone number--but not an American one, which is the only number I have at the moment. There were only two ways to give us a new PIN, the nice man at the bank explained: either they could send it to me as a text message or mail it to my Fidenza address.

Well, then mail it to me, I said, since I don't have a phone number yet. I didn't realize till a week had gone by that it would take seven business days, not counting the day we were there, for the bank to mail out the new PIN, plus a couple of days for the envelope to travel through the Italian postal system to my mailbox--which ended up being almost two weeks.

You have to take a very Zen attitude, as Pam keeps reminding us.

Since then, it seems a phone number is necessary for anything from getting a discount card at the local grocery to connecting with the agent who runs our building. Sometimes I can get away with giving my U.S. phone number; sometimes people will accept my email address as contact information. But being without an Italian phone number feels a bit like being undocumented. You can get away with it, but being phoneless means I'm not quite legitimate.

There is, moreover, a further wrinkle. Last summer, when we were in Southern Italy, I bought SIM cards from TIM, the Italian equivalent of Ma Bell, for our wi-fi hotspot and for Lina and Steven (Max wanted a super-duper powerful gamer SIM and insisted on buying his own). That insured that none of us had to miss a moment of whatever crap was on the World Wide Web while we rusticated in a remote mountain village in Molise. Then I got another SIM when we were here in Fidenza in November. And of course I didn't renew any of these SIM cards when they ran out, because why would I want to pay for Italian phone service when I wasn't in Italy?

But when I presented myself at the local internet shop after my visit to the bank and asked to renew my most recent SIM, I was told that I could neither renew it nor buy a new one. I'd had too many; TIM would have nothing more to do with me, at least not when it came to supplying me with SIM cards.

Apparently underworld types had been given to buying bushels of SIM cards and using them for  various kinds of shady business, so a tight limit is now imposed on how many SIMs you're allowed to have. I'm not clear if TIM is done with me for life or if I'll be able to become a customer again in a few years. For now, though, if I want cell phone service I have to turn to some other provider.

I'm already paying Vodafone, the second biggest provider in our area, something like $40 a month for internet, and it rankles me to pay god knows how much more for a phone number that I'll probably rarely use. Apparently that's part of the cost of being Italian, though, and so I will pay it. And try not to be stupidly petty about it, either.