whoddathunk?

I am so impressed with myself today. The guy from France Telecom came today to fix the damned Internet connection in my apartment. He arrived and it turned out he spoke only a few words of English. My French is now good enough that I actually managed to explain the problem - which is intermittent - well enough and "discuss" it with him that he figured out what was wrong in about 90 seconds. Voila! Gold star for me!!



It then took about 5 min to fix, which involved using an external USB WiFi adapter on my laptop, rather than the built-in one it came with. Why? Because apparently there is a slightly different WiFi protocol here, and though your WiFi on a U.S. laptop works in a cafe here, it's unhappy with a France Telecom ADSL modem/router. I guess they're as picky about their computer languages as their spoken one.