Sooner or later after your arrival in Germany, you will have to make a phone call to some company or other.
The sad truth is, you cannot expect toll-free numbers.
Our ISP has one, our garbage collection folks, too.
Most others, including the airline that managed to crush the pet taxi** as well as really all big companies dispense with the nicety and many make you pay a "premium" rate.
The Germans are not alone with this. In Britain, the tax people of HMRC have premium 0845 numbers, making sure you get charged every time you ask about taxes.
For calls to HMRC alone, the figures are staggering: 136 million pounds according to The Independent.
We have not looked hard and have not found hard Euro figures for the Germans, but would bet there is a lot of money going somewhere for calls that are toll-free in the U.S.
One way to rectify this is to use Twitter. If a company feels they need to charge you 30 to 60 cents or more a minute to talk to a rep, ask the question on Twitter.
From here on out, I will use Twitter if a company does not provide an email contact or a toll-free number.
If the cost cutters and profit maximizers cannot see any benefit in letting me get in touch without a rip-off, then their reputation becomes the currency of the communication.
It is a win-win.
Other consumers get a better idea of what is going on, and I will not be upset and angry on the phone because they don't put me through fast enough or leave me stuck in the "For Elise" or "Greensleves" muzak loop.
This should be good for the retention of their call center staff. Less aggro, more smiles.
Thing is, II talk really slow, always have, with this strange habit of weighing my words, and that makes these phone calls more expensive for me than for others I know. Yeah, you can discriminate all you want against slow talkers. Soon we will be the only ones left you can pounce on without fear.
[Update 11/2015] That was Lufthansa. Since bottom of the pet taxi was covered by a triple layer of old towels, as you might expect for a long flight, we noticed the foot long gash in the bottom only after we cleaned out the pet taxi. Lufthansa used the "sorry to hear that" approach, so they haven't had us as passengers since.
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