Live & Learn

Being the life long learner that I am, I learned something today. I really hoped my vonage voip phone would work over here in Malaysia and I had brought along a wireless telephone set to test it. Well, the voltage on the wireless set was 110 volts so that would not work with the 220 volts Malaysians get out of the wall socket. So off I go to Carrefour (Costco equivalent) in hunt of a wireless telephone set. It turns out they are hard to find as most Malaysians use cell phones.

I eventually find one and the price of $150 ringgits is not bad so I decide to purchase it. The salesperson we are talking to is not very good in English and she points over to a testing station where folks are opening up packages and testing whatever is in them. Well this is a 'Phillips' phone and I figure how do you test a phone without a phone line and a person to call so I decide not to test. I get home and open the box and guess what? I am the proud owner of a power supply but no handset or base station. Lesson learned - Testing stations are there for a reason, if only to check that all the pieces are there. Someone obviously pilfered the phone out of this box.

My dilemma now is whether I try to take it back to plead my case or simply chalk it up to experience. Caveat Emptor is very important in Malaysia!!!

We now have some food in the house and I sit at my laptop, connected to the internet, sipping a glass of Yellow Tail Shiraz from Australia so all is good. We also just had the cable guy in and signed up for the movie, sports, and learning channels. All for 60 ringitts a month or $20 CDN. I just hope it is ESPN. The cable guy's english was not great, so who knows I may be watching sports in Mandarin. I can always call Francis to translate. Hey Francis over here I am referred to as a Gwailo (white ghost, apparently only the Chinese are real persons).

Shelley just informed me the orange juice we thought we bought is actually orange drink, similar to Sunny-D. Oh, the lessons we learned today.

TTYL,

Jim