Try 1p mobile. My wife and I have been with them for over two years. Excellent user interface and helpful CS if needed.
Happy to report that our house is now fully connected to the interweb…
I think their cheapest deal is £10 a month.
Probably a bit steep for a “test” SIM.
I missed your post. That *does* temper the enthusiasm a bit - but, as I said, at least it is progress even if it does turn out to be slow.
Sorry!
The Maire also said Arcep and all the internet providers like Orange had been given a kick up the derriere, so hopefully you won’t have to wait as long as i have.
Fingers crossed
Though even when I can order I need to run the gauntlet of getting a rendez-vous when I’m there and the inevitable no show by the engineer.
I’m with Sosh, and the last time I needed an intervention they sent me the contact details of the technician so I was able to liaise directly with her about the precise time of arrival etc. Very helpful
Indeed - but I don’t have a French phone no and I struggle with French on the phone anyway.
I plan on sorting the former, giving the service provider a UK No at best doesn’t work and at worst is a big red flag to the engineer - but I would prefer to buy a SIM face to face as I do not really want to be sending photos of my passport across the Internet.
However even that seems difficult - in the UK many supermarkets sell phones and I’d still expect to find a phone shop on most high streets but they seem few and far between in France. there’s a Bouygues boutique in Vannes. I see you can make appointments on their website so I don’t know if you can just drop by to pick up a SIM.
All the comms with the engineer was by text so plenty of time to get some help from Deepl if required.
You could get a 1.99€/month Sosh sim sent to your French property. You would need a French bank account number (Revolut is fine) and to send them a scan of your passport though.
As noted the idea leaves me cold. If there’s no other way then the bullet has to be bitten but only as a last resort
Isn’t the default password just “admin”?
Typically not on anything recent.
It is on my 5G router, which is only a few years old.
I have to present my passport in LeClerc, when I get a new SIM but they just write down the details
Do you raise your glasses and say “It is I, LeClerc”?
No but just pissin past their door does get me in trouble
I don’t think the French got the joke where Allo Allo was concerned - apparently it wasn’t all that popular when shown on French TV, though it seems the Germans liked it! But other sources I have read say it was liked in France, so who knows…
It did find at least one fan in France though - it seems that once upon a time a French Navy officer was on a NATO exchange programme aboard a Royal Navy warship and was tasked with making announcements over the Tannoy.
During his tour of duty he prefixed every announcement with “Listen very carefully, I shall say zis only once…”
I would love to believe that story is true.
Dubbing 'Allo 'Allo must have been a nightmare considering how the gags were frequently based on (eg) Officer Crabtree’s mangling of French (but in a way which only works in English). Or indicating that characters were supposed to be speaking French/Italian/German/English by use of different accents (OK, that might work but not sure how funny it would be to, say, a French ear).
Eg “I was passing by, when I thought I might drop in” became “I was pissing by, when I thought I might drip in” - how the heck do you render that in French so that it is amusing?
Or “Who is the drover of this tonk”?
Weirdly enough we often don’t find foreign people gussied up as stereotypes speaking a music-hall version of our accent in a foreign language remotely funny, and the jokes based on these mispronunciations in another language, for an audience of native speakers of that language aren’t comprehensible.
Feel free to call me a humourless French person but speaking purely for myself I thought the show was lame, unfunny, in poor taste, and about as acceptable as blackface. This is based on seeing several times about 5 or 10 minutes of it.
But then the UK wasn’t occupied (bar the Channel Islands) so that might also account for it. I wonder if Channel Islanders find it funny?
(Edited because one of my sentences displeased me.)
No need to apologise, humour is very subjective, and there is a strain of British humour (the seaside postcard variety) that doesn’t always travel well. And I totally get the point about the Occupation.
I had mixed feelings about "Allo "Allo, as well as some of Lloyd and Croft’s other sitcoms, e.g. “It Ain’t 'Arf Hot Mum” and “Are You Being Served”.
I found Allo Allo amusing some of the time but yes it did rely on stereotypes which are not fashionable any more.
ETA: on the one hand I found many of the characters and some of the jokes amusing but there was always that background feeling about the subject matter being unsuitable.
Then again, Spike Milligan (who served in North Africa and Italy in the Royal Artillery and was “blown up at Monte Cassino” as he put it) got a lot of comedy mileage out of WW2 and often did Hitler impressions in his “Q” TV series, so maybe it’s just another way of dealing with the horrors of war.