The Run Around

With technology these days, doing everything on the internet should be a piece of cake, but it's interesting to find out how much you can't do on the internet.  This past week in the capital we had quite a few business items to take care of via 'high speed' internet at the guest house where we were staying.  Everything we need to do seems to be dependent on the other things that also need to be taken care of.  So, for example, we need to buy plane tickets for a trip we hope to take in September.  Before we do that, however, we needed to activate our newly arrived credit card, since ours got stolen just upon arrival to Chad.  In order to activate the credit card, we needed to call the company and verify our identity, which meant spending $30 in international calling minutes, only to have them tell us that we needed to upload copies of important documents onto their online system.  The documents they wanted were: 1. a copy of our passport, 2. a W2  and 3. a copy of a recent utility bill.  This is where the run around came to an end.  We were able to upload the passport and W2, but no matter how much we tried to explain to them that we don't have a real address, they insisted on having a utility bill.  This is where it becomes beyond humorous folks, because not only do we not have a physical address, but we don't even have utilities.  We get electricity on random nights, and we did give our neighbor a 20 dollar bill to pay for the electricity to ensure that it would continue working, but I'm pretty sure they didn't give him a receipt for that.  And so now we are back at square 1 with no credit card.  I guess we could try to apply for a new one, but then again, I'm not sure what we would write on the line that says 'address'.