Technology Trials

After a week at work, I still didn’t have a user ID or password for an office computer. Things seem to move a rather slowly here. On Friday, the internet quit working at 2pm (which isn’t so bar for a Friday, it just meant we left work early!) but it’s a little less convenient on a Monday at 8am. Office hours are usually 7:30 or 8am until 4:30 or 5pm, our poor IT woman was so busy battling the Conficker virus that she wasn’t able to set-up my computer until 1pm. Luckily there is a lot of published literature around the office, so I drank tea and read old publications for five and a half hours. With the conference coming up in two days, I was disappointed to lose a morning of working. When the internet is working, most web sites that use a lot of graphics time out before the page loads. I haven’t been able to watch video clip or log-on to Facebook since I’ve been here… that’s probably a good thing… less distractions I s’pose.

One thing that’s really stood out to me here is the cost and availability of technology compared to what we have in the states. The internet is more of a luxury here – the cheapest I’ve been able to find it at internet cafés is $3 USD / hour, which isn’t bad, but considering how painfully slow the internet is, the time goes by pretty quickly. It takes me twenty minutes just to log-in to my credit card account and make a payment or an hour to download a single song from iTunes. Luckily, gmail has a basic HTML format available so the pages load more quickly, but my Stanford e-mail account, Bank of America account, and CNN.com take too long to load here, so I haven’t been able to access them yet.

Now, cell phones. Everyone has a cell phone. I heard you could buy them pretty cheap here, around $30 or so for a basic phone, I actually got mine for N$199 ($25 USD) which included N$50 of airtime. Awesome! Also, most phones here use pre-paid airtime. None of this 2-year Verizon contract stuff. There are three major carriers, MTC (most people have this), CellOne (I have this), and **. You can buy “time up” cards anywhere, usually in denominations of N$5, N$10, or N$30 (like $.75, $1.50, and $4 respectively). Most stores sell them and there are always people selling them on the street. It’s amazing how long airtime will last you… I’ve been texting people a ton since I’ve arrived, and made basic phone calls for taxis, safari and rental car availability, etc. and have used less than $5 of airtime. It’s wonderful.