Today was an amazing experience.\u00a0 I get my land line and internet service from my cable tv provider.\u00a0 Yes, yes, I know.\u00a0 I should have cut the cable years ago.\u00a0 But I\u2019m 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.\u00a0 But anyway, I\u2019m still using these clowns.<\/p>\n
So, I get home today at about 2pm and I open my laptop and all my open webpages are MIA.\u00a0 I restart the Wi-Fi and \u2026 nada, zippo.\u00a0 So, I travel down into the bowels of the earth to check out my modem.\u00a0 And the worst had happened.\u00a0 It looked totally dead.\u00a0 Not three lights or two or even one.\u00a0 No lights.\u00a0 I performed the sympathetic magic.\u00a0 I turned off the power and counted to thirty and flicked it back on.\u00a0 Once again, zippo.\u00a0 It was truly and utterly dead.<\/p>\n
So, I called up the cable company on my emergency phone.\u00a0 I\u2019ll have to say these guys have absolutely mastered the science of aggravating non-human communication.\u00a0 The synthetic female voice they\u2019ve selected is Karen incarnate.\u00a0 And everything she does and says enrages me.\u00a0 If she asks me a question, it sounds like she\u2019s finished but just as I try to answer, she throws in an unnecessary addendum and talks over my answer.\u00a0 She\u2019s relatively deaf and even for an AI she\u2019s really quite stupid.\u00a0 Finally, she exasperated me so badly that I shouted something at her.\u00a0 At which point she thanked me for being a loyal customer and hung up on me.\u00a0 I think that\u2019s the first time I\u2019ve been terminated by a machine.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Eventually I managed to reach a semi-human.\u00a0 This was slightly less aggravating.\u00a0 After about fifteen minutes I convinced this customer service professional that the modem had died indeed.\u00a0 So, I asked if a serviceman could be sent today to replace it.\u00a0 She started laughing.\u00a0 \u201cWe don\u2019t send servicemen to your house anymore.\u00a0 We\u2019ll have it delivered and you\u2019ll install it sir.\u201d\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
I objected and said I didn\u2019t want to be without phone or internet for three days.\u00a0 She countered that I could pick it up at one of their conveniently located storefronts.\u00a0 I grumbled \u201cOkay, where is it?\u201d\u00a0 It turns out it was forty-five miles away.\u00a0 So, I choked back my rage and said, \u201cFine.\u201d\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And a mere hour after that I was home and I had the internet mostly running.\u00a0 But my land line is still not working so I\u2019ll have to call them up still again.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 Back when AT&T was the whole shooting match, I never lost service and if my equipment wasn\u2019t working properly, they sent a competent repairman out who would fix the problem promptly.\u00a0 They would never send me to the ends of the earth after first torturing me with an artificial human playing twenty questions with me.<\/p>\n
This can\u2019t be the way future is supposed to work.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Well, it\u2019s worked.\u00a0 I\u2019ve gone around the bend.\u00a0 I love Big Brother.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today was an amazing experience.\u00a0 I get my land line and internet service from my cable tv provider.\u00a0 Yes, yes, I know.\u00a0 I should have<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[4664,4663],"class_list":["post-30319","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","tag-corporate-incompetence","tag-incompetence"],"yoast_head":"\n