Ah, Maroc Telecom. We meet again.
Maroc Telecom is one of the three (maybe four, if you count Bayn…but really, who uses Bayn?) large telecommunication companies in Morocco. I would argue that it’s the biggest– pretty sure the king either owns the company or has a large stake in it, so, needless to say, it’s pervasive in the Moroccan collective consciousness. And I mean, why wouldn’t it be– look how happy and modern the people in that commercial are? Why wouldn’t you choose to purchase from this company?
Maroc Telecom and I go all the way back to 2011 when I received my Peace Corps-issued phone. We didn’t hang out too much at that point– Peace Corps negotiated our contracts and paid them monthly for us– but everything changed a few months later when my roommate and I decided to have WIFI installed in our apartment. It was an adventure; many visits to several Maroc Telecom agencies, two separate contracts filled, several confusing phone calls, and a lot of time spent waiting. We eventually got WIFI set up, but our two years were marked by consistent outages (one that lasted a whole month– that was fun!), some rather dramatic mix-ups with our bills, and– my personal favorite– the time when our cables got cut without warning.
Honesty, these happenings (or lack thereof….lolololololol) didn’t bother me too much. I knew that we were out a ways from the city; perhaps these were the charming little quirks of having WIFI in the countryside. SO, when we moved to the big fancy cosmopolitan center of Fes this year, I assumed that Maroc Telecom and I would be reuniting on different terms. This is, after all, a place with a lot of businesses and places that need WIFI for work. Wiring up a single apartment should be easy.
Hypothetically.
To start the process, we went to the Maroc Telecom office on a Monday (our first full day in Fes– this was obviously a priority). After filling out the appropriate paperwork, I was hopeful when the man behind the counter told us there would be somebody out to our place on Thursday. Wow, Thursday! That’s in like, three whole days! I was so pumped that I didn’t even mind when nobody showed up on Thursday. Someone from the office called us to let us know that they’d be there Friday instead…or Saturday morning. Wow, they actually called us to let us know that they needed to reschedule– how professional! When Friday evening came to a close, not a note of concern rang throughout my being. They said “or Saturday morning.” Guess we can be expecting them bright and early! When Saturday morning turned into the afternoon and then the evening, Mustapha had to give them a bit of a nudge. He called, explained that someone had promised to come and install our WIFI on Saturday, and the very nice man on the other end of the line told us that someone would be out on Monday.
Well, you can guess what happened. There ended up being a question about my ID– my carte nationale is expired, so I used my passport, but that’s apparently not kosher– so some negotiating was involved. It took us two Thursdays after the Thursday initially named for Dar Quizzarghani to get hooked-up to the rest of the world.
But that was just it. A hook-up. Two men came to– quite literally– hook up cables. They came, they hooked up, and then, as they were heading out the door, Mustapha asked them about the phone and the modem. “Oh, you don’t have those already?” Apparently, they were just cable guys. There were other guys who existed, somewhere in the world, who took care of actually connecting the newly-installed cables to the modem and the phone. After a bit of negotiating (always with the negotiating and an exchange of a few dirhams), the cable guys agreed to go back to Maroc Telecom, pick up the phone and the modem, and make everything come together and work properly.
…needless to say, it wasn’t that easy. They brought the phone and the modem, hooked them up to the cables, but neither item actually worked properly. “You’ll have to call Maroc Telecom,” the cable guys from Maroc Telecom told us. “They can activate everything for you.” So, we called Maroc Telecom. And called. And called. People sometimes answered us and promised to activate the phone; other times, they told us we would need a Maroc Telecom technician to visit. Mostly, though, we just got to listen to the lovely automated voice on the other end of the line telling us that they were closed. After another week, we finally got someone out to look at the modem. “You need to take this to someone at Maroc Telecom to fix,” the guy from Maroc Telecom told us.
So, we did what the man from Maroc Telecom told us to do– we took our modem into Maroc Telecom. The guy played around with it and sent it back a few hours later. It was like we were in some weird Groundhog Day situation; the newly “fixed” modem still managed to not work. So, we sent back the modem the same day. By this point, it was dark outside, so our go-to guy told us he would work on it the next day.
The next day, the modem still didn’t work. The guy finally just handed over a new modem. The signal showed up on my computer, the password worked, and suddenly, I was able to access my email from the comfort of my own home– and only one month after signing up.
So, you know, I guess the moral of the story is, countryside or city, you can’t have it all. At least, not until you’ve waited a few weeks and have talked to like 18 different people.