Codice fiscale. Lost phone

Long day on Wednesday, with good and bad stuff. We started out going to the local tax office to apply for our codice fiscale (roughly equivalent to a SSN). We had downloaded the forms and filled out everything, as well as bringing photocopies of our passports and visas as required. When we walked in, the lines filled the entire room and there was barely room to stand. The sign said Prima Informazione (first information), and there were two long lines, both moving very slowly. So we got into the line for codice fiscale and stood there for over half an hour until we finally got to the desk. Along the way we chatted with a nice Italian who had lived in England for a long time and obviously wanted to speak English. When we finally got to the desk, a man asked what we wanted, looked briefly at our forms, and then printed us each a ticket with a number on it. He then told us to go sit down and wait for our numbers to be called. Not sure why they don't have a machine to do that directly, like they do at the post office, but in any case we were on the next step. After a little more than half an hour, we finally got called up about the same time. Within ten minutes we were out of there with a codice fiscale assigned and printed. Nice! Here is the second waiting area, with the screen showing which numbers are up at which window.

From there we drove directly to the huge Metro marked ("Costco on steroids", my wife called it), where we bought a bunch of stuff for us and for the Institute. There are some items at Metro which are not to be found anywhere else around here, and the prices seem very good, but with an irritating gotcha sometimes. They tend to have big packages of items with amazing prices, but we found to our dismay that the price listed is often "per item", not for the package. Thus, when we thought we were getting 20 dishwashing pads for, say 2 euros, it turns out that the 2 euro price was for each pack of two, not for the whole package, so it cost 20 euro instead of 2 euro! This happened a few items, which we realized as my wife read the receipt on our way out. The prices still aren't bad (and some are very good), but nowhere near as amazing as we thought. Next time we'll know to be careful.

But it turns out that was the least of our problems. As we got into the car after packing the purchases into the trunk, my wife couldn't find her (new) phone. We looked all over, then she went back into the store and walked every aisle again, looking for it to no avail. Her Pebble smartwatch had lost the Bluetooth link to the phone, so the hope was that it would reconnect when she got close. No luck. Maybe she got pick-pocketed, or maybe she just dropped it or put it down somewhere. She spoke with the front desk, giving a description of the phone and leaving my number to call if it shows up. Of course we then had to go to get her a new SIM card for her old phone at Vodafone in the mall, which ended up meaning that she had to change phone numbers or her monthly charge was going up. Frustrating, but it seemed like the best option, and fortunately only a handful of folks know and use her number thus far. The sales guy was very helpful and very fun. Armed with our new codice fiscale and a chip-and-PIN credit card (we're not sure which to thank, but we are happy), this time they accepted our autopay request, which will save us a time and money.

After that we did some general shopping at Auchan, then came home, where my wife got to reconfigure her old/new Samsung phone, again. She had only been using the new Moto G5 Plus phone for four days before losing it 😟. Fortunately, the lost phone cost under $300, so it could have been worse. Somehow her Whatsapp history also got  lost -- she had backups, but they were not accepted.

BTW, my wife's toe is doing much better. It still hurts, but much less, and the bruising is not as bad. Looks like she was lucky on this one.

In what was left of the evening, I helped Kristen Hall set up Zoom on her Mac so she can teach the English BofM class Thursday. I also reconfigured the living room, moving the book case and routers/modems next to my desk, with only a long DSL phone cable running around the room. That puts the WiFi router closer to the rest of the house, and it also allows me to connect with an Ethernet cable when needed, which matters now because our WesternDigital MyCloud 3TB NAS device arrived from amazon.it. We'll use it for sharing large files between us, as well as backing up our laptops.

So we ended up having much less time available than planned, but we laughed our way through the day. If losing a phone is the worst thing that happens to us on our mission, we're doing good. The Lord is blessing us in so many ways that we aren't going to complain about a small setback.