With the American midterm elections approaching in November, it was time to exercise my civic duty. As a US citizen temporarily living abroad, this meant preparing our absentee ballots and sending them back to the US. A perfectly ordinary task, or so I thought. I should mention that I have always been fascinated by international mail. I have been sending letters and packages across borders for decades, and I still find something almost magical about the whole process. The idea that I can hand a package to someone in Portugal and have it appear a few days later in the US is genuinely impressive. I get an even greater kick out of receiving packages from abroad, particularly when they contain something someone has personally selected and mailed to me. There is something wonderfully satisfying about objects traveling thousands of miles to reach their intended recipients. For this reason, I generally prefer to send international mail in person. Postal workers usually know their business, un...
One of the things I have learned during my stay in Portugal is that the relationship between paying for a service and actually receiving that service is considerably more philosophical than I had previously imagined. The telecommunications industry, it turns out, offers some particularly interesting examples. When we moved to Coimbra, I needed home internet and two mobile phone lines. I had been using a prepaid Vodafone SIM purchased at the airport, which worked perfectly well but was not an ideal long-term solution. DIGI, a relatively new telecommunications operator in Portugal, offered an attractive package with fiber internet and two mobile lines for substantially less than the established providers. As someone who appreciates a bargain, I decided to give them a try. One Saturday, I visited DIGI's physical store in Baixa, Coimbra. The employees were very pleasant and helpful. They checked my address, confirmed that fiber was available in my building, and signed me up for the ser...