Why do fools...

I am rapidly falling out of love with Italy.

When I first moved back here I was excited about building a life. After all, I reasoned, although I don't speak much Italian, I have lived in several countries and Italy was, by far, my favourite. In addition, I have friends here and, with my qualifications and experience, it wouldn't be difficult to find work. These things remain true. I have found work relatively easily, I do have friends here (and I've made more) but, and it's a big but, I am becoming increasingly frustrated at the Italian attitude to business.

To be more specific, I'm sick of being on the receiving end of the 'shrug, what can been done? Shrug'. An example of this is my trying to get an internet connection. You may have heard of internet keys. In essence these are SIM cards which you plug into a USB port on your computer and use to connect to the internet (much as you would make a mobile phone call). I bought one of these. The package, with AliceMobile, was 20 euros for 100 hours of internet access every thirty days. After 100 hours, you can top up at 2 euros an hour. Of course, what they didn't tell me (although I'm sure it's written somewhere in the small print – that they knew I couldn't read) was that every connection incurred a minimum deduction of fifteen minutes and, of course, where I live the connection is so piss poor that it isn't unusual for the connection to be lost after one or two minutes. The upshot of this is that although I have only been connected to the internet for 66 hours over the last eighteen days, I have have 100 hours deducted because of the incessant disconnection by the server.

Of course when I complained I got the 'Shrug, what can be done? Shrug' response. I ended up signing up for a different plan, one that doesn't measure the time online but allows you to download up to 1Gb every thirty days. Of course, I had to pay for this plan to be 'activated' and I won't actually be able to use it until tomorrow (this is being written offline). What they couldn't explain was whether the automatic opening of the AliceMobile website (which has to happen otherwise I can't access the internet) is part of that download. I don't know quite what constitutes 'download' , how much of it would be used by the automatic opening of the AliceMobile website or if it's only when you use a download program (although I doubt it). The downside for me is that I've downloaded more than 1Gb over the past 18 days, generally when trying to download podcasts which failed, so I've no idea how many days each month I'll be able to use it.

And the post office – my god, the post office. I wanted to post a letter, actually an invoice for payment so I went along to the post office. There were so many people there that the queue snaked back and forth three times in a post office not much bigger than my parents front room. So many people that no-one else could actually get in the door (and I don't think anyone could get out either).

There are other things that annoy me, mainly to do with the people I'm working for, trying to maintain a professional demeanor and getting others to respect boundaries. I'm working on those but I cannot guarantee that I'll win, and, if not, I won't remain in Italy.