Nursat Guy To The Rescue!

So we bought this icard (like a phone card but you use it to buy time on the internet) from Nursat (the telecom company of KZ) and we were having trouble getting Jim's computer to dial into the access number so we could go online from our hotel room. He had tried all kinds of combinations of country codes, dial-up numbers and other tricks but couldn't make it work. Having total confidence in his Russian skills, Jim called Nursat customer service to find out what we were doing wrong. Yes, you read it right--he called customer service in Kazakhstan. What follows is a factual and true account of what happened--no exaggerations and nothing made up.

Jim calls customer service and gets the one guy who speaks no English. He passes Jim off to a woman who speaks some English but it was slow going. She kept telling him to go to www.nursat.kz to get help, not understanding that we couldn't get on the internet in the first place. Once she understood the predicament she asked where we were, what hotel, etc. and said she was going to send a tech support guy to our hotel room the following morning at 9 a.m. Jim gets off the phone and tells me this and I immediately go into paranoia mode, to paraphrase: "So you just told a perfect stranger in a foreign country who we are, where we are staying and when we will be here and you really believe Nursat is going to send some guy here just to set up our internet connection?!?!" So we decided that in the morning we would tell the hotel front desk not to let anyone up to our room for any reason whatsoever for fear that they would just rob us blind.

About 1/2 hour later we are turning off the lights to go out to dinner and there is a knock on the door. Jokingly, I said "There's your Nursat guy" and opened the door....to the Nursat guy! Seriously, that was the first thing out out of his mouth--"Nursat." We were immediately comforted by the fact that he looked like that guy from the movie Office Space and he got straight to work on the computer without casing the room for valuables. He was here about 10 minutes setting up our internet connection, showing us that we had it right but hadn't put in a few commas that were needed to dial in correctly. He showed us how to enter the login and password that were on the icard and also told us we had won a prize (!) from some scratch-off thing on the icard. We don't know what the prize is or how to claim it but we were pretty excited. Then he was off to free the world of connectivity problems! Thanks, Nursat Guy!

By the way, yes it was totally free. Can you imagine your ISP sending a tech guy for free, within 1/2 hour, to help you connect to the internet? We didn't even have to go through the annoying "Turn your computer completely off and unplug the phone line. Now turn your computer on. Now attach the phone line. Now let me do an online diagnosis of your computer. It must be a software problem (if you call hardware people). It must be a hardware problem (if you call the software people). We can send someone out next Tuesday between 9 and 3 at a cost of $149." Kazakhstan is awesome!