By Weldu T.

"Welcome to Ethiopian Telecommunications Corporation's 997 service, all operators are busy handling other calls, please hold on till one of them will be with you in a moment."

I had to go around the office trying to see how the majority of people would define a ''moment'', just to make sure that I have not been fired up by my frustrations.

A colleague said: "I don't know, a second or two maybe?"

Another, apparently a football fan, said, "It depends on the action that you take. Take  for example a goal being scored. It happens in a fraction of a second..."

Still another: "It is contextual, it could mean a year, but if you are talking about answering a call, well then it would be under two minutes."

Telecommunication's definition of a ''moment'' seems to be just as varied.

Anyone who has ever attempted to use the services of the 997 operators will agree with me that they would better have saved time if they had chosen to leaf through some sort of directory or made a couple of other calls to find the number they wanted.

The average time that it takes for an operator to respond to a call is somewhere between seven and eight minutes, and in the meantime...

"Welcome to Ethiopian Telecommunications Corporation's 997 service, all operators are busy handling other calls, please hold on until one of them will be with you in a moment."

Impatient people such as me would have felt better if they had let us known from the start exactly what their definition of a moment is.

But the worst part of it all and the most embarrassing is that you could have waited all that time and when the operator responds, you could will be given the wrong number.

I know because it has happened to me a number of times.

I once asked for the telephone number of the Police Station at Bole Sub-City and I was given the Federal Police Headquarters.

Had it not been for the kind operator at the Federal Police, it would have even taken me more time to get to where I wanted.

About a month ago, a call was made from our office, inquiring about why we were having difficulties accessing the internet; the official whose name I will not mention here, asked for our DNS server number and said that things will be taken care of.

I do not think he meant in a "moment" when he said it will be fixed shortly, but I did not think either, that he was saying that it would take a month (and we are waiting) for things to work smoothly again.

It is supposedly a broadband connection, and clients pay fees expecting a 24/7 service, and yet the reality is that one can hardly expect to get a proper connection even for seven minutes these days.

Since my inquiries about what exactly is the problem were not successfully answered by the Ethiopian Telecommunications, Corporation the next best thing I could do was check with someone whom I thought might have some idea.

"It might be that the DNS servers are having problems. Or it might be that the servers are congested."

I asked if it really would take a month to fix such a problem.

"If the servers are having problems, two days are maximum, even if you are lazy going about it. If the servers are being congested then that is another matter that I can not talk about," this acquaintance tells me.

So what does one do under such circumstances?

You revert to the old dial-up connection. And guess what? The 900 does not connect properly.

How many days does it take for telecommunication people to fix some problem that you reported to 997? Seven days and maybe more... God knows if that falls in the category of telecom's countless "in a moments."

The corporation claims that it has introduced the latest cutting edge technology available, has made a lot of progress in expanding its client base....and reacts fiercely when criticized.

Fierce as the reaction maybe, I am sure I am not the only one who feels that the least that the Corporation can do is try to be efficient with whatever technology it currently says is available before bragging about how it will introduce new ones.

It would also do the corporation some good if it were open to the feedback that it gets from its clients, rather than being defensive and quick to pounce on whoever dares make comments about its poor performance.