When we arrived at the house on Friday, we noticed that the broadband router only had the power light on. There was Wi-Fi but no Internet service. When I power-cycled it, the other lights illuminated as they should but then went out.

We had planned to sort out Greek mobile numbers for ourselves and went into Chania on Saturday morning, looking for COSMOTE shops as we passed through. Having parked in probably the tightest underground car park I’ve ever been in, we returned to the closest.

Getting a PAYG SIM was relatively easy; after showing some photo ID, and filling in a form with all my details, including my ΑΦΜ (tax number), I was given my SIM. I explained the issue we had with the router, and the assistant gave me a number to call to report the fault. I finished the call to support with the promise that someone would be in touch. The assistant had obviously checked the contract because she told me that the one we were on (that we had inherited from the previous owners) had expired and was very expensive.

They offered me a deal including unlimited calls, texts and data SIM, and an unlimited data Mi-Fi SIM for about 2/3 the cost of the existing landline and broadband. I gave Deborah the PAYG SIM and signed up for this! The assistant entered a request to terminate the telephone line into the system and said I would receive a call to confirm this.

When we saw our property lawyer this morning, I mentioned the deal we had received and that we were cancelling the landline. He recommended that we keep it as, with the limited number of lines available, we may wait a considerable time to reconnect. Thus, when COSMOTE called about the cancellation, I let the operative talk me into keeping the landline and broadband for a reduced cost (about 25% of the current) as it only runs at 3 Mb/s.

The icing on the cake was when the 2 local COSMOTE engineers turned up as we were having lunch; they came in, looked at the router, power-cycled it, saw the result and pulled a replacement out of their van!