Dealing with bureocracy

Allegedly, Napoleon said that England was a nation of shopkeepers. He probably meant it as an insult, but for me is one of Britain's virtues and I miss that above many other things. I love to shop in England, online, in Malls, in chains, whatever... is a pleasant experience, you're allowed to browse 'till you drop, exchange no reason asked, pay with whatever you happened to carry with you and the post is reliable and fast if you want to use ebay or amazon or whatever.

The whole concept of business seams to be different here.
Let's start with the concept of time, which here is definitely not related to money in any way. Time is more of a relativist idea, very Einstein's, meaning that nobody really cares about time, so the delivery man will say that he'd arrive between 9 and 12 am and you can be waiting for ever, the same with your GP: they give you an appointment card with a date and a time but that's only a sort of guideline regarding the time that your GP will actually see you. As for my students... some are better than others and I'm always on time to start my class... only to be left waiting there for ages, there's one group which are always at least 30 minutes late each and every class. The worst bit is when they call and cancel the class in advance, because if the class is cancelled with more that 24 hours notice I don't get to charge that, so I miss my earnings.
That's the only thing I really dislike about being my job, because it means that even when my time is always taken since the beginning of the month, I never know for sure how much I'm going to make at the end of it.
That's why I'm still searching for a more stable kind of job.

Then there's the horrendous costumer service when shoppers are treated as a nuisance and that's even before they need some help, so imagine trying to complain about whatever problem!!

When we first moved to our rented flat, we got a phone with Telefonica, it took them for ever to connect us and the service was total crap, we complained and nothing was really solved so we moved to another phone provider. We were asked why and we told them and we thought that'll be the end of it. No! Now we discovered that they were taking money from our account to pay for a commercial phone (much more expensive that a family one) for months even though we did not have a direct debit with them!! I don't even know how they did it. They took around €1.000 and now they refusing to give our money back! They say they investigating the matter and that can take forever. We're considering going to the ombudsman but we cannot even find one!!!
I do believe that the employees at Telefonica did that on purpose to us after we complained, as a sort of vendetta. Because even when (and there's still a big if) we solve this, nobody on Telefonica is ever going to be penalised, it's nobodies fault and we got all the trouble.

Now I find out that I want to return the lovely MP3 player that "the husband" bought for me. It's totally gorgeous but it doesn't have a radio and doesn't run with Linux (the operative system that I use in my computer instead of Windows), so I want to change it for another one. I'm bracing myself here because it's long an uncomfortable enough if you want to exchange something in person in any shop so to exchange something that you bough online and got by post... I don't even want to think about it.
There's a reason why people here don't shop online and even ebay is only just starting here. Actually, there's probably more than one reason as we're sure to find out soon.
"The husband" e-mail the company and they're ok with the exchange and say that they'll contact us to agree on how to do it. That was yesterday and I'm still waiting. I'll let you know about this.