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We live only blocks away from a Starbucks and a movie theater with stadium seating, so it came as a surprise when I discovered that, according to a wide variety of telephone and cable companies, we still live in Podunk.
I was trying to find someone who provided high speed Internet service in our area, but I was finding out that barely anyone did. "I'm sorry sir," one lady said, "Your area is too rural. You may be able to get your tractor repaired locally, but you'll never get DSL. Maybe you should go back to your crops and forget about it." I hung up my cell phone, had my android assistant bring me another drink, and tried another company. The end result of my phone calls was that there was only one outfit (as they say out here in the boonies) that provided service to our area, a company called "Cheater." Cheater was eager to provide us with high speed Internet. They also wanted to replace our cable service and our phone service with their own. I wasn't interested in either of these, especially since it had taken months to get our cable service to work correctly, and we were now functioning under the axiom that (Like my grandpappy used to always say when we talked about getting an indoor toilet) "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." I set up an appointment for Saturday, between eight and noon, to have high speed Internet installed. Throughout the week, we had several people call to confirm that, yes, we did have an appointment for Saturday, and - oh, by the way - were we interested in their cable TV and phone services? We counted a total of six calls, and that's without exaggerating the number. Saturday came, and at one o'clock that afternoon, after no one had arrived, my wife called Cheater and asked them what was going on. Perhaps, I speculated, the mule that they use to deliver things in our area had broken a leg. The lady on the phone told my wife that she would need to talk to me. Their conversation went like this: "You'll have to have your husband call us to resolve this problem." "He's right here." "You'll have to have your husband call us to resolve this problem." "He's right here." My wife handed the phone to me. "It's really important that you call instead of your wife," the lady told me in a robotic voice not unlike that of my android assistant (whom, incidentally, my wife had sent off for a couple more drinks with the instructions, "Less Seven Up, more vodka.") Overcoming that hurdle by adding my wife as an authorized caller, I told the lady that, based on Pacific Standard Time, our service man was a no show. Her response was that a technician was available in our area, and we should stay at home and wait for him. I made the wacky suggestion that perhaps they call the local installation service, ask what the delay was, and ask when they would arrive. Maybe they could even get back to us with that information. "We'll send them a form," the lady said. "We'll them a form every hour if we have to. Stay where you are." We did as ordered. At four forty-five that evening, the man from local installation service called and told us that several people had called in sick. He asked if we would like to reschedule. My wife and I debated the issue and decided to go for it, but we were no longer certain it was a good idea. Working with the people at Cheater had proven to be even more time consuming and aggravating than accessing a graphic-intensive website via a dialup modem running on Windows 98 while trying to download megabytes of content. Which, I might add, is pretty frustrating. We rescheduled for the following Saturday between eight and noon, and I was relieved to see the service technician at two o'clock that afternoon. My wife had left to go shopping for a carrier pigeon so that she had a way to quickly send messages to her friends. I had just gotten off the phone with Cheater, who had called me to ask if I was interested in any of their other services. I believe I said "Are you kidding me? I can't even get the one I ordered installed!" Our technician was an okay guy, although he was a tad bit forgetful. After he had installed the service and gotten into his truck to go to his next stop, I found a bag of cable connectors he had left in our garage. I ran them out to him and he thanked me. As he drove away, I felt pretty good about myself, and then I saw that he had left the check I had given him on the floor of the computer room. The switch inside that changes me from being a good person to a bad person flipped over to the dark side. I didn't call anyone. I just set the check aside. Later that night, the technician called us because he couldn't find the check in his paperwork. I told him he could pick it up anytime he wanted. I would leave it at the side of the house, hidden under a pile of cow manure. So now we have high speed Internet, and it's a wonderful thing. I can send my wife instant messages telling her how much I love her while she's sitting only three five away from me in the computer room. We can play poker over the Internet without having to go through all the trouble of taking those pesky playing cards and chips out of the closet and setting them up at the dinner table. It's great. I just love technology. Don't you? |
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