We Don’t Send Servicemen to Your House Anymore

Today was an amazing experience.  I get my land line and internet service from my cable tv provider.  Yes, yes, I know.  I should have cut the cable years ago.  But I’m lazy and I also like to watch Turner Classic Movies so I never bothered to figure out a streaming stratagem that would save me some real money.  But anyway, I’m still using these clowns.

So, I get home today at about 2pm and I open my laptop and all my open webpages are MIA.  I restart the Wi-Fi and … nada, zippo.  So, I travel down into the bowels of the earth to check out my modem.  And the worst had happened.  It looked totally dead.  Not three lights or two or even one.  No lights.  I performed the sympathetic magic.  I turned off the power and counted to thirty and flicked it back on.  Once again, zippo.  It was truly and utterly dead.

So, I called up the cable company on my emergency phone.  I’ll have to say these guys have absolutely mastered the science of aggravating non-human communication.  The synthetic female voice they’ve selected is Karen incarnate.  And everything she does and says enrages me.  If she asks me a question, it sounds like she’s finished but just as I try to answer, she throws in an unnecessary addendum and talks over my answer.  She’s relatively deaf and even for an AI she’s really quite stupid.  Finally, she exasperated me so badly that I shouted something at her.  At which point she thanked me for being a loyal customer and hung up on me.  I think that’s the first time I’ve been terminated by a machine.  I think I know now how Dave Bowman felt when HAL 9000 terminated his call after refusing to let him back in the space ship.

Eventually I managed to reach a semi-human.  This was slightly less aggravating.  After about fifteen minutes I convinced this customer service professional that the modem had died indeed.  So, I asked if a serviceman could be sent today to replace it.  She started laughing.  “We don’t send servicemen to your house anymore.  We’ll have it delivered and you’ll install it sir.”  It turns out they would ship it the next day and it would arrive in about two more days, depending on the vicissitudes of UPS or FedEx or whoever they send it by.

I objected and said I didn’t want to be without phone or internet for three days.  She countered that I could pick it up at one of their conveniently located storefronts.  I grumbled “Okay, where is it?”  It turns out it was forty-five miles away.  So, I choked back my rage and said, “Fine.”  And she wished me a happy and bountiful day and asked if I agreed that she had solved my problem to my full satisfaction and then reminded me that Big Brother loves me.

So, I schlepped out the door with the defunct modem sitting next to me in the passenger seat and commuted into the wilds of southern New England with the afternoon sun in my eyes and utter contempt for my cable provider in my heart.  By the time I got there I was calmer and as it turned out the folks at the store were much more helpful and friendly than the telephone drones both carbon and silicon based.  And a mere hour after that I was home and I had the internet mostly running.  But my land line is still not working so I’ll have to call them up still again.

It occurs to me that after living my whole life with instant communication as a living breathing reality the service I receive from my communication company has deteriorated by several orders of magnitude.  Back when AT&T was the whole shooting match, I never lost service and if my equipment wasn’t working properly, they sent a competent repairman out who would fix the problem promptly.  They would never send me to the ends of the earth after first torturing me with an artificial human playing twenty questions with me.

This can’t be the way future is supposed to work.  I have to assume that our civilization has been infiltrated by an evil race of space mutants that have a fiendish plan to slowly drive us insane via cable providers.  Well, it’s worked.  I’ve gone around the bend.  I love Big Brother.