Postepay pays up!

We arrived home to all the usual sorts of problems. One of them was that the chest freezer was switched off.

I’d always thought there was a danger of this happening. This is because the power circuit in the main body of the house tends to trip now and again for no apparent reason.

Therefore I’d been terribly cunning and arranged a series of extensions to plug it into the single-storey part of the house where the power circuit is quite separate and seems much more stable.

After this system had been tried with perfect success for several weeks before we left, it decided to fail during our absence. The element in the chain which takes an Italian socket to a British plug went caput, quite unforeseeably.

With the result that a lot of our food went soggy.

However, the good news is that there was a card from the postman saying he tried to deliver 2 registered letters which were ……. 2 cheques for €600 each from Postepay!!!

These funds could not have been more welcome.

The sunlit olive grove after harvest

I reported in to the various neighbours, to tell them we were back and give them news about Clive, and was told how much oil our miserable olive harvest had yielded – but in quintals so I’m none the wiser.

Banging my head

What I've been banging my head against

Over the last couple of days, at all different times of day, I’ve been phoning the Postepay number I acquired, hoping to catch someone there. Today, out of the blue, someone phoned from ANOTHER number asking, like one of the 3 bears, who it was that kept ringing her phone?

 Normally if you want to know who’s ringing your phone, you answer it.

 That’s 3 phone numbers I have now, all for Postepay in Rome, and not one of them is ever answered.

 The bear looked in the corridor and found my original woman, who was so anxious not to spend any time talking to me, that I got nothing out of her other than that we will have to wait at least another 2 months to get our €1,200 back.

“We have so many of these things to deal with,” she sighed, by way of a response to my gasp of horror and disbelief.

So as to be sure not to leave any stone unturned, I went into the Post Office. There was a stand-in for the day (just my luck) who seemed to have even less blood in her than most of the people I’ve talked to.

“I was alarmed to hear that if we hadn’t put in an official claim within 90 days we’d have lost the money,” say I.

 “Oh, I know nothing about those systems. I couldn’t possibly comment,” says she.

 Anyway, she gave me a form to fill out – tiny print, blurry with too much photocopying. I realised when I got it home that it’s for making a complaint when a parcel has been damaged.

 After a bit of hunting, I found what I believe is the correct form on the internet, filled it out, and prepared the attachments to go with it. It comes to 9 pages.

I’ll take it to the Post Office and see if I can persuade them to fax it for me.

Vivaldi’s ‘Autumn’

Autumn colours in persimmon leaves

I heard a great deal of the opening part of Vivaldi’s ‘Autumn’ today, when Postepay kept putting me on hold.

One woman, after telling me to have ‘a moment of patience’ while she checked the records, even disappeared altogether behind the music, like a squid behind its ink-cloud.

It really bugs me that such people can hide behind their anonymity and get away with telling lies like that.

I emerged from all this futility, battle-scarred and world-weary, into the most beautiful autumn day.

The roses have more buds and flowers than they did at the height of summer, and the leaves on the orchard trees are turning glorious colours.

Everywhere there are thumps and rattles and bangs as acorns fall onto the differentiated-rubbish bin lids, or the roof, or the tiled walkway round the house.

Before long, the gravel in front of the house will have changed colour and be completely brown with acorns.

Sometimes I hate Italy

What I mean is I hate Italians. Some Italians. But I mustn’t soften it too much because that’s how I feel at the moment. Here are a few reasons why.

1) I’ve made 4 phonecalls today to a plumber who is due to deliver some important paperwork tomorrow. Each time he was supposed to be phoning me, and the matter still isn’t resolved.

2) Yesterday I had a phonecall from Postepay who have appropriated €1,200 of our money and are sitting on it with no apparent intention of giving it back. The woman told me that we ‘need to make a complaint in writing in order for anything to be done about it’. No-one else, in dozens of calls over 2 months, has told us this. Nor did we know that if we’d let 3 months go by without communicating in the ‘proper fashion’, we would have lost the money. Scary. We sent the required letter by fax to Postepay yesterday evening, asking the woman to phone us. Not having heard, I phoned her towards lunchtime today. She hadn’t seen the fax. She promised faithfully to phone us before the day was out to confirm that she was doing something about the problem, but of course she didn’t. I phoned just before the official close of play, and she’d gone home.

3) We’re coming up to the renewal of our household insurance at the end of November. We’ve been insured with an Italian company (of necessity, because of compulsory 3rd party cover for the dogs) but have had a good offer from a British company and want to move the other elements of our cover over to them. On 25th October I phoned the Italian insurance rep and asked if we could reduce the cover. Yes, he said, and even gave me a rough quotation. Now, 3 weeks before renewal, he says we should have given 30 days notice in writing to end our current insurance, before taking out new, reduced insurance. Since we didn’t, we are legally bound to continue our existing cover with them.

4) I asked a geometra to phone me as soon as he’d received an email, both by phone and in the email itself. The Read Receipt came through at 5.30 pm and he never made contact in the whole evening. We were due to arrange a meeting for tomorrow.

What is it with these people? Clive calls it ‘the Italian promise’ and ‘Italian lies’. This was just one day’s-worth of frustration, and all down to typical Italian behavioural characteristics.

Slow, slimy and slippery

Postepay money-pit

The pre-paid card responsible for our woes

Postepay is a prepaid credit card issued by the Italian Post Office. It hasn’t proved itself a money-pit in the usual sense, of absorbing any amount of expenditure, but in a more literal sense.

2 of the credits we transferred onto it over the last couple of months would each, separately, have taken the balance over the limit allowed on the card.

We didn’t at the time know what the limit was. The card didn’t come with any instructions or conditions, and we misunderstood the information we’d gleaned from the internet.

The 2 credits, which together amount to over €1,000, have gone from the originating account but are nowhere to be found within Postepay.

I’ve now spent double figures of hours on the phone and in the Post Office trying to trace this money.

Each time we go over the same old weary ground, then I’m told a different story.

Today I spoke to 3 people on the phone. The first one was so rude (exclaiming “Jesus!” when I asked her to repeat what she’d said) that I asked for her name and she promptly put the phone down on me and then blocked our number for the next 15 minutes or so.

It’s possible (though I doubt it) that they sent a cheque to the address we moved from 4 years ago. This would have occurred because, although of course the application form asks for your address, they completely ignore the one you give them and take it instead from the register associated with the original issuing of your identity card.

That particular point got cleared up, but just at the moment we have no idea what’s going on and whether anyone is even trying to sort the muddle out.