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Having lived in many places, I have had many phones and many problems with them. Fortunately, my phone service was always provided by "Condescending Buttheads Incorporated (CBI)," a division of "We Don't Really Care" International.
Perhaps you're already sensing some bitterness. Let me provide some examples of service provided by CBI to give you some insight into my attitude. One month, and this is not comic exaggeration, I received a $600 phone bill for calls of a deviant nature to various 900 numbers. As much as I would have liked to have made these calls, I did not, in fact, make them, because my wife is around a lot. Convincing the phone company that I am not a pervert, turned out to be a difficult, if not impossible, task. They were barely able to mask their cynicism and disdain when asking such questions as, "Is there anybody else in your household who could have made the calls, you filthmonger?" I found out that both my next door neighbor and my upstairs neighbor had calls to the same number appear on their phone bills. I also discovered that the phone utility room had been broken into. In addition, the calls on my bill overlapped. One call would start at 11:00 p.m. and end at 11:15 p.m., while another would start at 11:05 p.m. and end at 11:20 p.m. There were a few possibilities: either I lived in an apartment complex full of degenerates and I could travel through time (which I have done before, but not in this instance) OR somebody had broken into the utility room and done some tricky wiring. This option seems the most probable as the police arrested a guy for doing just that. I tried to convince the phone company of this, but they said, and these were their exact words, "Mr. Smith, that doesn't seem very likely." I literally spent several hours on the phone trying to clear this up, which was a huge waste of time because the people at the phone company do not talk dirty. I am also, apparently, not the masochist they think I am. The phone company refused to help me, so I did what I do whenever I find myself in trouble, I ask my wife to save my sorry butt. She did, and within several minutes she had convinced the phone company that the charges were incorrect and should be removed. We even ended up with a credit. When I asked my wife why she was able to do this and I was not, she said, "Because you're a man." Recently though, we have had another phone problem, where we cannot receive collect calls. Just as in the previous situation, we were able to back up our position with facts. I explained this to my good friends at CBI, but they said, "We're not interested in facts Sir, we only care about wasting your time, asking belittling questions and making you feel inferior. It's our job." (I may be paraphrasing.) Again I called upon my wife, but apparently the phone company has a new non-sexist policy of abusing everybody. My wife was fuming when she got off the phone with them. And she was mad too. The explanation that the phone company provided for the fact that we can't receive collect calls is that everyone who calls us collect is trying to call us from jail. The problem still hasn't been resolved, but that's okay because I've moved up in the social world from being a pervert to being a jail bondsman, and what really matters is that I feel better about myself. I have only the good people at the phone company to thank for that. Thank you, CBI. (Disclaimer: the above humor column may have included sarcasm.) |
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