The summer heat and now several violent thunderstorms overnight have caused havoc with electronic communication networks here in my part of southern France. Accordingly this morning the local supermarket, and indeed nearly all the other businesses in the town, have been accepting
only cash (or cheques, you remember them, thankfully they're still commonly used in France) because unless one has independent satellite-based internet access the whole town's ADSL/cable network plus the fixed-line telephone lines are currently down, yet again, for the second time this week. Oh how I smugly smiled at all the foreign tourists ineffectually proffering their credit cards - whether chipped, pin'ed or contactless, they were all equally useless - while I was waved up to the front of the queue and so paid my €37.82 grocery bill, exactly, with just a few notes and coins.
MarkUK, your comments about mobile phones - whether they be smart or dumb - also stuck a chord.
As I mentioned above, the communication networks are nor particularly robust here in remote and rural southern France. Where I live there is still no mobile coverage, however many Gs the networks claim, but I did still have a fixed telephone line (with Orange) which also supported the credit card machine for my business. That was until about five years ago when a thunderstorm knocked it all out (as well as physically blowing up my telephone). To cut a very long story short Orange kept saying they were sending someone to fix it, only for me to keep calling to say it still didn't work, and for them to say a technician would be there in 24 hours ... and so round and round for six weeks until I simply cancelled the contract. However sometime later I did manage to collar, nicely, the technician while he was working on another line, and he admitted that he'd only been told to turn out once to attend to my line, had promptly reported that the whole infrastructure needed replacing, and had thereafter heard nothing more. Orange have never publicly said that they have abandoned the line but as the technician freely admitted that is actually what they have done. Accordingly I, and I suspect all the other houses along that 8km telephone line, have found other solutions. I now have a voice-over-IP telephone via my computer's satellite connection (remember there's no mobile phone coverage here) unfortunately it still doesn't work very reliably, although the credit card machine does seem to work OK.
Faced with all this and the fact that it is now almost impossible to buy anything at all online without the means to independently receive a security code or QR scan, just a few months ago I finally gave in to the inevitable and decided to get a mobile phone, despite the fact that there's still no coverage here and so I'll rarely get to use it.
However just buying a mobile phone was complicated ... largely because to get one you are supposed to already have one. Orange will not accept an order for a mobile phone, nor arrange delivery of said phone to an address, without an acceptable, Orange-approved, telephone contact. In the end I managed to fool the system with a very old mobile number (no doubt long-since reassigned to someone else) to get round it trying to send a secure code to a fixed telephone (defunct because Orange themselves have abandoned the line) while also side-stepping the fact that Orange's database (which as a customer you cannot edit) has my address completely wrong. Luckily though my regular postie knows my name and address and was able to put two-and-two together, and so it arrived without problem. But to actually use it I still have to drive 2km up to the village if I'm to have any chance of getting a signal.
Isn't technology wonderful.