Category: Current Events

Genesis and Crickets

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I think it’s interesting that the people who run the western world have decided that life as we lived it is no longer acceptable.  The old status quo won’t do.  Here was the old contract.

KJV, Genesis, Chapter 1

27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

BlackRock and friends disagree.  And they’ve got lots of money.

 

Rank Company Managed Assets (USD trillions) Country
1 BlackRock USD 7.43 trillion USA
2 The Vanguard Group USD 6.2 trillion USA
3 Charles Schwab Corporation USD 3.3 trillion USA
4 UBS Group USD 3.26 trillion Switzerland
5 Fidelity Investments USD 3.2 trillion USA
6 State Street Global Advisors USD 3.12 trillion USA
7 Allianz USD 2.36 trillion Germany
8 JPMorgan Chase USD 1.9 trillion USA
9 Bank of New York Mellon USD 1.9 trillion USA
10 Capital Group USD 1.8 trillion USA

 

Now I don’t see God’s ranking in the above table or how many googolplex US dollars He has under management but I’m guessing it’s way up there.  And I don’t remember the Almighty saying that BlackRock shall inherit the Earth.

But howsoever the management changed hands, the new model doesn’t include us being fruitful and having dominion over much of anything.  And instead of the fish and the fowl and the cattle being ours, those of us that will be allowed to hang on for a while under the new arrangement will have to subsist on crickets and meal worms.  I may be behind the times but that used to be what you fed a pet anole lizard, not the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve.  So, it seems to me that at least in the United States the deal has been broken and not by us.

Granted, evil men have enslaved humans for millennia.  Every free society has eventually succumbed to feudalism.  Athens did.  Rome did.  We will.

But today isn’t necessarily the day it has to happen.  And we don’t have to make it easy for them.  The globalists have screwed up the economy and everything else in this country over the course of the last decade or two.  And they don’t seem to be all that popular with even the people who are supposedly their bought and sold constituencies.  So, whenever we have the chance to screw with their plans that’s what we should do.

And you can usually see what they’re trying to pull over on us from a mile away.  They’re hardly subtle.  The Global War on Terror, the Patriot Act, BLM, COVID, the George Floyd color revolution, Climate Change, the Ukraine disaster, transgenderism, the list goes on and on.  Well, look at what the Bud Light revolt did to the transgender scam.  It taught Anheuser Busch (and Target and Disney to an extent) that American families don’t want to be lectured about men in dresses.  A similar thing happened in Virginia when the schools tried to impose critical race theory on the public schools.  People said no.  And then they voted against the guy who wanted to be governor but said parents shouldn’t have a say in what their kids are taught.

You get the idea.  Pick your battles and hurt them whenever you can.  Guerilla warfare.  They’ve got the money.  We’ve got the numbers.  And even their “friends” don’t really love them.  There are all kinds of problems within the coalition of the aggrieved.  Traditional societies like those found in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and Asia don’t really support the sexual deviancy that the Left has made the most celebrated part of their coalition.  This has been showing up more and more.  Using it as a wedge issue is a winning strategy in some areas like recently in Michigan.  And with the issue of pediatric transgender affirmative care becoming a flashpoint even in places like California all kinds of unlikely alliances might pop up in the future.

I guess what I’m saying is I’m not ready to give up yet.  Local battles can be won.  Many smaller victories can add up to larger ones.  Idiotic young people can grow up and become wiser, at least slightly so.  And our enemies aren’t geniuses.  They can make mistakes and they can have a run of bad luck.  And stop waiting for miracles.  Two steps forward and one step back.  That’s how it goes.

So, hang in there and don’t eat the crickets unless you’re related to that GEICO gecko.  Have a little pride.

Now on with the Opera

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As I previously described, my cable and internet provider, or as I call them, the Ministry of Static, has upgraded my service to some unheard of number of petaflops per second of binary goodness.  I know this because they tell me it is so.  Of course, the picture looks the same and the data transfer from YouTube and X are equally erratic as before.  But they tell me it is so and they are honorable men.  They are all of them honorable men.

Honorable men or women or giant talking celery stalks or whatever else they hire there at the Ministry.

But what is undeniable is that I had to install the new router and the cable box.  And even though these operations went surprisingly well, eventually I got back to programming all the devices into the master remote.  Ah yes.

“One thing to rule them all,

One thing to find them,

One remote to click them all,

And in the darkness bind them,

On the living room couch where the snack crumbs fall.”

So there I am trying out all these codes to get the master remote to turn on the tv, audio receiver, the dvd player and the roku thingamabob.  And I’m thinking what the hell am I wasting my time for?  There’s nothing on the damn cable anyway.

But the truth is we’re creatures of habit.  Sixty some-odd years of television viewing has conditioned me to plunk myself down in front of this device, or cluster of devices, in expectation of something that could be defined as entertainment.

And so I dutifully performed my task and I even managed to improve the set up so that Camera Girl doesn’t have to use the audio receiver to switch between separate output buttons when switching between the cable and the DVD and the roku audio.  And she verbally patted me on the head, much as she does with her dogs and other critters.  Well at least she didn’t give me half a dog biscuit.

And when everything was hooked up and working it was nice that it worked better than the old one.  And I will admit that watching a YouTube video that theorizes about how consciousness might be accounted for in quantum theory is kind of a fun thing.

But then I remember how in the old day YouTube was called books and that there are even certain advantages to paper podcasts.  Like writing notes on the pages.  But I shouldn’t get too crusty.  Human beings can waste time with or without the latest tech hardware.  The trick is to actually earn your daily bread while wasting the time.  Which I guess I did.  I even vacuumed up some of the dust I found under the old cable box.  It was a kind of frightening accumulation.  If you’ve ever seen a dust explosion you know the destructive potential of finely divided solids.

But the really frightening thing is that that stuff is either dead skin cells, or even worse, dead mites that lived off dead skin cells.  I feel like some brontosaurus with my own ecosystem living on my back.  It’s not a flattering thought.  Note to self: vacuum the entertainment center once a season from now on.

Well I wrote this frivolous post because they say tomorrow, Friday the 13th is some kind of jihad day for Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Isis, Al Qaeda and whatever other Islamic psychopaths are still around.  If that’s so I wanted to have a little fun just in case these lunatics created further havoc and spoiled my mood.

And I think that, part of their plan is to make us so miserable that we lose the will to enjoy life.  I think back to 9/11/2001 and how we spent years watching the newscasts and worrying about the soldiers over in Iraq and it sucked all the joy out of life.  And they said that if we didn’t go on with our lives the terrorists win.  Well, they won.  They had lots of help from George W Bush and the rest of the Uniparty but in a real sense they took years away from our lives.  And we got back nothing.  So now I want some fun even when they’re blowing up everything.  And I blame them all and I hate them all.  Hamas, Joe Biden, Hezbollah, the FBI, Al Qaeda, the LGBTQ Mafia, ISIS, Anthony Fauci, Islamic Jihad, the Media Liars and all the rest of them.  They steal away our joy and our lives.  Well, not today.

 

Now, on with the opera.  Let joy be unconfined.  Let there be dancing in the streets…   drinking in the saloons, and necking in the parlor.

Play, Don.

Virtue Signaled – Employment Canceled

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Negotiating the intersectional landscape of the Left must be very tricky.  Since right and wrong have no relevance you might find yourself backing the beheaders of infants in a statement that will be read by future employers.  And so Ryna Workman, non-binary of color, President of NYU’s Student Bar Association finds itself out of a job.  And so Ryna will discover that employment is a binary condition.  Either you are or you aren’t.

“NYU Law School Student Bar Association president Ryna Workman, who reportedly identifies as nonbinary and uses “they/them pronouns,” issued a statement disseminated to the group’s student newsletter declaring “unwavering and absolute solidarity with Palestinians in their resistance against oppression toward liberation and self-determination.” Afterward, Winston & Strawn LLP announced Tuesday that it learned a former summer associate “published certain inflammatory comments regarding Hamas’ recent terrorist attack on Israel and distributed it to the NYU Student Bar Association.” “These comments are profoundly in conflict with Winston & Strawn’s values as a firm. Accordingly, the Firm has rescinded the law student’s offer of employment,” the law firm said.”

But the bad news continues for the not so lovable non-gender-conforming scamp:

New York University’s Law Student Bar Association on Wednesday moved to oust its president, who had penned a controversial pro-Hamas column in the school’s newsletter, as school brass issued yet another statement condemning the comments.

https://nypost.com/2023/10/11/nyu-law-sba-moves-to-remove-president-who-championed-hamas-attack/

So maybe the takeaway for Ryna is if you truly are an idiot don’t advertise it.

And Then What?

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The world continues its descent into madness.  Ukraine, Gaza, West Africa, Taiwan, Argentina, Venezuela, Mexican Drug Cartels, American urban violence, and on and on and on.  Yesterday I bemoaned it.  Now what?

Now nothing.  What can you do?  Nothing I can do will bring back the murdered Israeli women and children.  Nothing I can do will drive Joe Biden from the White House a single day before his expiration date.  Nothing I say will stop the mayor and the district attorney in Chicago from releasing murderers onto the streets of that city.  These are the result of massive forces shaping the world around us.  Millions of people and billions of dollars are at work behind these events.  Putting my shoulder to that wheel is absurd.  I might as well try to fill in the Grand Canyon with a teaspoon.

All I can do is use my teaspoon to eat a bowl of ice cream with Camera Girl and talk about the world we live in and attack our tiny priorities one crisis at a time.  And our micro-scale problems often are tinged with the same poisons that infect the macro-scale crises.  We deal with runaway inflation and scarcity of replacement parts for everything from dish washers to automobiles.  And we struggle to find competent repairmen and tradesmen.  We all had to struggle through the COVID nightmare/farce.  We all have to keep aware of where we are with respect to dangerous environments, unreliable businesses and strangers.  And like everyone else that’s what we do.

We attend to our own business but we also affect those in our circle.  We talk and we persuade those that we know and meet.  We tell our truths and listen to other people’s truths.  This website is my small megaphone that I use to talk and listen to a larger circle of people than my neighborhood.  The hope is that talking to our circles creates ripples in this ocean of people.  Maybe like the famous butterfly effect all those ripples might reinforce each other and one day form an enormous tidal wave that will wash away our enemies’ fortress.

Now that was a lot of mixed metaphors indeed!

So, I’ll continue to rail against the plethora of problems caused by all of the Left’s programs.  And I’ll categorize them by their hallmarks; evil, stupidity, dysfunctionality, insanity, depravity, cruelty, dishonesty, deviancy and ugliness.  I’ll call out all the lies that the left-controlled institutions quote in their echo chambers.  And I’ll try to do it with logic and maybe even a little humor.

So that’s what I can think of saying when the world blows up on a particular day and it’s just impossible to put a smiley face on for the world.  Monsters will murder innocents and Harvard University will side with the monsters and blame the innocents for getting in the way of all those bullets and knives.  And that’s just the way it is.  I’ll call the killers monsters and I’ll call Harvard a pack of gutless cowards.  But then we have to move on.  After all there’ll be new gutless cowards tomorrow and the show must go on.

It’s Always Yeat’s Second Coming That Comes to Mind

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The Second Coming    BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

Turning and turning in the widening gyre  

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere  

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst  

Are full of passionate intensity.

 

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.  

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out  

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert  

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,  

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,  

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it  

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.  

The darkness drops again; but now I know  

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,  

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,  

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

 

I always come back to this poem, if poem is the right word.  Warning or nightmare or terrible vision of the future.

 

“Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”

That line always seems apt for whatever the present-day atrocities.  Maybe because we unconsciously buy into the progressive propaganda that the arc of history is on our side.  And when the arc starts shifting away from our plans, we’re shocked at the failure of history to behave and these surprises appear to be anarchy.  Well, no one’s buying into that arc of history jazz this morning except Lindsay Graham.  For him the answer to every failing war is another war to distract from the failure.  The wars and atrocities are starting to pile up nicely and even the moron in the White House must be getting nervous about how few tanks, artillery shells and Bradley Fighting Vehicles are still in reserve and we haven’t even begun our next forever war.  But what am I worried about?  We have all those nice shiny ICBMs just waiting for their targets.

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”

That’s right.  When the center is rotted out a strong wind will blow the tree down.  Time to start over from first principles.  No more empires, no more foreign adventures.  Marshal the strength to restore the health of the people who make up this country before we think about fighting Russians and Chinese and whoever else is on the regime hit list.  Maybe if the Pentagon is in need of employment, they can take on the Mexican cartels in New Jersey and Arizona.  Or if that’s too daunting maybe they can try to reclaim downtown Baltimore and Washington DC from the gang bangers and car jackers.  They don’t have combat drones yet as far as I know.

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst  

Are full of passionate intensity.”

Who would even try to deny these charges.  Look at our leaders!  And worse, look at the people.  Those two statements sum it up beautifully.  Joe Biden and Antifa.

“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,  

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

This one just seems too prophetic of all.  Look at Europe and even America and tell me how it will resist a reign of terror with the leaders we have currently in charge.  After our post 9-11 rampage in Afghanistan and Iraq what has been improved in the Middle East?  All we managed to do is arm the world with our abandoned equipment and show our enemies that we have no idea what we’re doing.  And now we send billions to the mullahs in Iran to arm the Palestinians.  We might as well ship them a few ICBMs so we can get the main event started.

Maybe the end of history will turn into the end of us.  Unless this country wakes up and takes the reins of power away from the lunatics currently running things, the cities of this country will be indistinguishable from Gaza and Beirut.  We let in millions of hostile strangers and think there will be no consequences.  These people want what we have and they will take it and make us live by their ways.  And even the LGBTQ might look back on the intolerant right of the 1980s like heaven on earth compared to the rough beast about to be born in the desert.

How Would You Clean Out Gaza

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Netanyahu says he will destroy Hamas in Gaza.  But how exactly will he do that?  Other than leveling the whole place with artillery how can you accomplish that?  I’m assuming he wants a method that allows him to separate women and boys under military age from the men before delivering ordinance to the areas to be cleared.

My thought is to announce ahead of time what buildings are going to be leveled.  That way everyone gets out.  Once a good chunk of the city is rubble, the women and children will be living on the street and in order to survive they will be forced to turn themselves in to the Israeli authorities for warehousing separate from the combat zone in Gaza.  I suppose eventually all of Gaza will look like Bakhmut; a bombed out hellscape.  Of course, even that won’t be thorough enough.  The Palestinians have built extensive tunnels that go to Egypt and under the walls into Israel.  So, even the debris will have to be removed to search for tunnels.

Now how will the Israelis differentiate between Hamas fighters and the rest of the men in Gaza?  I guess they can’t.  Does that mean they will kill all the adult men in Gaza or only those found under arms?  And if they allow surrender what will be the ultimate fate for these Gazans?  Will they execute them?  Will they imprison them for life?  These are not trivial considerations.  There are about two million Gazans.  If even 25% are adult males that’s five hundred thousand men.  In a country of seven million, that is like 7% of the population incarcerated for life.  That’s a staggering number and an enormous expense.

And if they intend to go building to building looking for the hostages then it’s a hopeless plight.  They’ll lose thousands of men during these endless frontal assaults on the high rises of Gaza.  I think my original idea is best.  Drop leaflets all over the city posting the schedule for which buildings will be leveled on which day and let the occupants be responsible for avoiding death.  That combined with a blockade on supplies will bring the Gazans to their knees in a few weeks.

The Siege of Gaza.  It sounds like an historical battle from the Roman era.  Who knows, maybe the Israelis will lose their nerve.  They will be vilified by Ivy League student organizations and the United Nations General Assembly.  And all those Gulf States that have begun diplomatic relations with them will turn on them too.  Maybe they’ll only make some symbolic attacks and instead build higher walls and add additional missile defense batteries.

But if they do, they’re doomed.  This will be the beginning of unending attacks from Gaza and the West Bank and Hezbollah in the north.  If they allow their women and children to be massacred with impunity it will break the Israelis’ belief in the strength and competence of their defense forces and it will ultimately undermine the stability of the nation.  Israel is an island of modernity surrounded by an ocean of medievalism.  To live with the barbarians always at the gates you have to have confidence that your leaders have developed a system to keep that ocean safely behind strong walls.

So, I think Netanyahu has no choice but to eliminate Hamas from Gaza.  But I’ll be damned if I know how, the hell, he’s going to do it.  I wish him luck.

I Wonder if He Means It

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It reminds me a lot of what W said after 9-11.  And I remember how that all ended up.  To my mind the only way Netanyahu can prevent the same thing from happening again is to empty out Gaza and draw a final line on the map between Israel and the Palestinians.

Is he willing to do that?  Is he even able to do that?  I guess we’ll see.

Benjamin Netanyahu – בנימין נתניהו
@netanyahu
“This morning, on Shabbat and a holiday, Hamas invaded Israeli territory and murdered innocent citizens including children and the elderly. Hamas has started a brutal and evil war. We will be victorious in this war despite an unbearable price. This is a very difficult day for all of us. Hamas wants to murder us all. This is an enemy that murders children and mothers in their homes, in their beds, an enemy that abducts the elderly, children and young women, that slaughters and massacres our citizens, including children, who simply went out to enjoy the holiday. What happened today is unprecedented in Israel – and I will see to it that it does not happen again. The entire government is behind this decision. The IDF will immediately use all its strength to destroy Hamas’s capabilities. We will destroy them and we will forcefully avenge this dark day that they have forced on the State of Israel and its citizens. As Bialik wrote: ‘Revenge for the blood of a little child has yet been devised by Satan’. All of the places which Hamas is deployed, hiding and operating in, that wicked city, we will turn them into rubble. I say to the residents of Gaza: Leave now because we will operate forcefully everywhere. At this hour, the IDF is clearing the terrorists out of the last communities. They are going community by community, house by house, and are restoring our control. I embrace and send heartfelt condolences to the bereaved families whose loved ones were murdered today in cold blood and endless brutality. We are all praying for the well-being of the wounded and all those who are being held hostage. I say to Hamas: You are responsible for their well-being. Israel will settle accounts with anyone who harms one hair on their heads. I appeal to the residents of the south: We all stand alongside you. We are all proud of your heroism and your fighting. To our beloved IDF soldiers, police officers and security forces personnel, remember that you are the continuation of the heroes of the Jewish people, of Joshua, Judah Maccabee and the heroes of 1948 and of all of Israel’s wars. You are now fighting for the home and future of us all. We are all with you. We all love you. We all salute you. To the medical and rescue teams, and the many volunteers who came out in force today in a long list of places, the people of Israel salute you. With your spirit, we will overcome our enemies. Today, I spoke with US President Biden and with other world leaders in order to ensure freedom of action for Israel in the continuation of the campaign. I thank President Biden for his strong and clear words. I thank the President of France, the Prime Minister of Great Britain and many other leaders for their unreserved support for Israel. I now appeal to all citizens of Israel: We stand together in this campaign. This war will take time. It will be difficult. Challenging days are ahead of us. However, I can promise one thing: With the help of G-d, the forces that we all have in common and our faith in the Eternal One of Israel, we will win.”

07OCT2023 – The Mundane and the Murderous

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So, my heating system maintenance contractor claims to have a replacement part to make all my problems go away.  But the guy who really knows what he is doing isn’t available until Wednesday.  Wednesday it is.  Cold showers until Wednesday.  Whoo!

Well, let’s see.  Inside their terror campaign the Palestinians are desecrating the bodies of murdered Israeli women.  Netanyahu says they will pay a terrible price.  He has his work cut out for him.  This has the potential of being the straw that breaks the camel’s back.  I wonder if the Israelis will decide to empty Gaza.  It would be horrendously provocative but what else will be effective as a defense against these kinds of attacks?  The only other solution is retaking Gaza and policing it which is also a daunting prospect.  Wait and see.

More and more as the world spins out of control the situation in the United States takes on a surreal aspect.  Currently we aren’t engulfed in war and destruction.  Not yet.  But the tyrannical forces that bring war to the streets of Beirut, Jerusalem and other flash points, we begin to see it demonstrate its power over the American people through lawfare and voter fraud.  Antifa and BLM become the shock troops in a way that is not wildly different from Hamas and Hezbollah.  We’re all living in a world becoming increasingly radicalized.

Will that change?  Could Americans successfully pull back from this undermining of the values we depended on to make our lives normal and stable?

Possibly.  But not surely.  Probably not even likely.

We may have crossed over some tipping point where there are just too many bad guys breaking things and not enough good guys trying to fix them.  But we’ve got to play the hand we’ve been dealt.  There’s no choice.  We watch the events playing out in crime ravaged cities and the halls of Washington DC as awful public policies and nonsensical or even malignant belief systems cause enormous damage to millions of individuals and the fabric of all of our lives.

But the real problem isn’t even with the Left that spreads these problems.  It’s our side that has failed.  Our leaders are compromised.  It’s our children who believe in these false values and policies.  They’ve given up on the things that made life wholesome and productive.  That is why I doubt this can be fixed.  So that only leaves the option of watching and doing our small bit and protecting ourselves from the fallout from the crash.  A grim existence.

The basset hound puppy is getting big.  She’s teething horribly and some of her teeth have already fallen out, but she bites Camera Girl’s hands relentlessly.  But she’s enjoying raising the crazy little dog too much to complain.  I on the other hand put on a pair of cowhide gloves whenever I’m in charge of her.  She’s a rambunctious creature but there is an infectious energy when you’re playing with a puppy.  It does make you feel more alive.  So, life goes on.  Even surrounded by crazy people overseas, crazy people in our cities and crazy people running our government we still do the things we must.  And try to find some joy too.

Upheaval and Disaster Stalk the Compound

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Several days ago, I called up my cable and internet provider.  I had previously received a cryptic warning about changes that would take place on a certain date and the equipment I would receive to allow for these marvelous changes to occur.  When the day of reckoning had almost arrived and no equipment arrived, I felt I had no choice but to do the unthinkable.  I would call my service provider up on the telephone.

This may sound like a normal activity.  I simply dial a number and I talk to a human being for a few minutes and communication occurs.  I remember when I still believed in such things.  Ah, those were the days.  Back when the cable guy would be sent to your house and install stuff and adjust things and telephone calls were answered by human beings or at least what sounded like human beings.  Wasn’t that an amazing time?

But now is not that time.  After dialing the number, I was greeted by the robo-voice giving me options in Spanish and English and so began my odyssey.  First in line was the repair/technical journey.  And this was the most straightforward part of the adventure.  They had contacted me.  They had told me what they were going to do.  They were upgrading the speed of my connection and so they had to send me higher speed equipment to take advantage of this upgrade.  And since my present equipment wouldn’t function after the change date, they had promised to send me the magical new equipment.  But where was this new equipment?  What had intervened to prevent my reaching the promised land of higher speed data transfer?

So, I selected Technical.  And then the dreaded canned music began.  It was as stultifyingly boring as anything I have ever heard.  After a mere ten minutes my skin was crawling and I could feel my resolve slipping away.  I was tempted to hang up and call back later.  But I knew the foolishness of such a cowardly act.  After all this was just the first round in what I knew must be an epic struggle to retain consciousness.  I persevered and after a reasonable twenty-minute wait I was speaking to a real live person.  And it was someone who sounded normal.  A woman who spoke English and was polite and understood what I was asking her.  It was too good to be true.  She understood exactly what was supposed to have happened and she only put me on hold for ten minutes while she reviewed the facts of my case.  I was ecstatic.  But what a fool I was.  When she got back, she was noticeably saddened.  She informed me that because my contract was very old the changes proposed could not be performed without transferring me to Billing.

My heart sank.  I had never been transferred to billing without suffering exasperation or even rage.  I have mocked and shouted at billing operators on numerous occasions.  I think it’s part of their training.  Here I was thirty-five minutes into the journey and I was being thrown off the parapet and into the dungeon.  I could hear in her voice just how guilty Technical felt.  It was as if she had given me a death sentence.  I said resignedly, “Okay transfer me.”  And the music began again.

I waited about five minutes.  It’s much easier to get through to Billing than Technical.  Then again nobody really wants to speak to Billing.  The people there are petulant, easily flustered, impolite and not very helpful.  Several times while I attempted to explain what I needed I was cut off by the rep.  And each time it was clear she misunderstood the situation.  Finally, after several system queries, she believed my side of what needed to be done.  She must update my contract to allow the normal equipment shipping order to go through.  The only thing that needed to be done to accomplish the update was to add five cable channels to my selections.  I told her to select them at random.  I didn’t care because I wouldn’t be watching them anyway.  But in an almost gleeful announcement, she told me that only a Specialist could approve the additional channels.  I would have to be transferred yet again.

I don’t think I cried out.  I think I staggered back a step or two.  I choked out the words, “Then transfer me.”  And the elevator music started up again.  I was a solid hour into the call and I knew that the wait for a specialist would be something between twenty-five and thirty-five minutes.  I put the phone down on a table and set it to speaker.  I stared out the window on a sunny fall morning turning quickly to afternoon.  Camera Girl walked by and heard the music and understood what was going on.  I could see she felt for me as a true and loyal wife should.

After the requisite half hour, the Specialist made her presence felt.  And she really was special.  She needed no information from me.  She methodically laid out the actions that she would take and the results that would follow.  She apologized for the problem and assured me that the upgrade would improve my service by a speed increase of 50%.  I was off the call in about two minutes.

An hour and a half.  This is the nature of our relationship to the companies that supposedly connect us to the world.  They erect barriers that punish their customers to avoid communication at all costs.  Remarkable.

And now I am faced with another equally maddening customer service nightmare.  My oil company also provides service on my heating system.  Or in theory they do.  A few days ago, we noticed that there wasn’t any hot water.  Because it’s been so warm for the last few days, we hadn’t noticed that the heating system wasn’t working.  I went into the basement and watched what was going on with the furnace.  When it called for heat the system went through its cycle but when it reached the point where the oil pump turned on it made an awful grinding noise and failed.  I called up the service number and told them what was happening.  They said they’d send a technician within from four to nine hours.  None hours later one showed up and after a couple of hours he had the system running again.  Apparently, a set screw had come loose in the coupling between the motor and the pump.

Hurrah, the system works.  Slowly, maybe, but it worked.  Then this morning, no hot water.  Wonderful.  Well, no shower but the promised four to nine hours later (well let’s just call it ten hours) the same tech is back.  But the news is bad.  Now it’s a part that they don’t stock.  And it’s the weekend.  And now I’m annoyed.  An hour ago, I hear the circulation loop running in the living room.  I run to the basement and see that somehow the heating system is running.  I run upstairs and manage a hot shower.  I’ve beaten the system, at least for tonight.  The weekend is sure to bring more tales of woe from the oil company.  Like the cable company they are there to make my life awful.  But this is the nature of the dysfunctional world we live in.  Customer service is a euphemism for customer abuse.  For them customers are supposed to be kept at arm’s length and prevented from costing anything more than the absolute minimum.  The idea that customer satisfaction is something that these corporations should strive for is laughable.

In both cases my providers are literally the only game in town.  Monopoly compels me to make the best of a bad situation.  Tomorrow I’ll install the new internet and cable devices.  I’m sure there will be numerous snafus.  And tomorrow I’ll begin negotiations with the oil company’s tech manager.  One way or another we’ll get something going.  And that’s the reality of life in Joe Biden’s America.  Satisfied customers are a thing of the past.  Now it’s stand in line and stop complaining if you know what’s good for you.  Welcome comrades.  Enjoy the hold music.  Next!