This is a picture of the Tygervalley shopping center close to Kaapse Draai where we now live, on a Saturday morning - an absolute nightmare. Everyone and their dog are up and busy with spending money. Everyone is totally focused on selling and buying things, not trying to solve problems. It is in this situation that I walked into this morning... thinking that services providers would like to delight me as a client, by solving my problems. I had two things that I wanted to resolve before I get on the plane for the US tomorrow: find a solution that I can lock my suitcase, but still have it accessible to US customs and get my phone to work as a modem to my laptop as it should. I got beaten badly on both accounts.
Regarding the suitcase: one sales guy told me that the only way that I can do this is to either buy a top of the range new suitcase for over R5000, or drill two holes into my still very workable Samsonite suitcase. When I asked him if some-one hasn't solved this problem in an eloquent way, he started breathing heavily while drumming with his fingers on the counter.
The phone thing was even more harrowing. I am quite technology savvy (seeing that I run a mobile phone software company), and knew that I needed a software upgrade for my Sony Ericsson K800i, but it does not help telling this to staff at Vodacom. "What is the problem, sir?", "have you checked if the phone is switched on", and "should not be a problem" were the range of advise that I got from numerous agents that was obviously insented on volume of sales and not on number of delighted customers.
In the end I had to give up, beaten into pulp. Why do people go to shopping centers? Seems more like a torture chamber to me.
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