My gut doesn't want to dwell on my life, as I'm watching events in Iraq closely and I'm horrified by what's happening over there. But life goes on, even if my heart and mind are mostly with our soldiers who are fighting and dying in a pointless and ill-advised war.
So.
Yesterday I had no internet and no television, as the cable was completely out. Luckily, I had a dentist appointment to distract me. Um. Or rather, unluckily. Anyway, I went to the dentist, got numbed up in the mouth for the first time in over three years, and had a filling replaced. They offered laughing gas, I took it. I don't know that it actually helped any in the way it's meant to, but I was concentrating hard on breathing properly and so it distracted me that way. The dentist and his assistant were cracking non-stop jokes, also, to the point where I asked if it was really me getting the laughing gas...
After the dental work, I walked from the dentist down to the library. It's not a bad walk, and I needed the exercise. It felt pretty good to get out, and I picked up a couple of books they had on hold for me, including the next Betty MacDonald book. This is the book I read as a teenager, that influenced me in many ways over the years. It's titled Anybody Can Do Anything, and I remember it being fun as well as very instructive about life back in the pre-WWII days. The copy I got from the library appears to be a second edition rebound, and it feels like it's carrying the weight of the years when I hold it. I can hardly wait to start it.
Moving on... to my immense surprise, somebody ordered some Oz t-shirts from my Zazzle.com shop. I suppose I shouldn't be terribly surprised, as Eric himself intends to order quite a few of the shirts I've made once we have some cash. I've mostly been enjoying myself coming up with stupid slogans like "Winged Monkey Airlines... Fly the Furry Skies!" Still, it's gratifying that one of the Oz fans enjoyed the shirts enough to buy some!
Speaking of hubby-Eric, he's getting a new computer. As I was researching digital cameras I found that none of the modern ones will work with his old iMac. In fact, I realized that he is sadly out of sync with his computer. Well, I was going to buy a laptop for myself, you may recall, before hubby-Eric's father so kindly supplied me with my current one. So I suggested to Eric that we take the money we had budgeted and get him a new computer. And after some quick on-line research, I discovered that because he's a teacher, he can get a really nice computer much more cheaply than I would have been able to. True, it's a Mac, but I've never held that against hubby. In any case, hubby-Eric's new computer is supposed to arrive sometime today. I look up every time I hear the sound of something that might be a FedEx truck... of course, as I wrote those words, a white van with a tiny FedEx logo pulled up and delivered the precious cargo. Now I have to wait until hubby gets home to see it.
Lastly, Comcast has me both irritated and pleased. See, the cable went out before I got up yesterday, and left me with nothing to distract me from my forthcoming dental appointment. When I got home, I called Comcast to see if they had an ETA on when service would be back. I got a "service" tech who didn't have any intention of actually answering any of my questions. When I asked if they had an ETA, he immediately said that they didn't know what had caused it, so it wasn't their fault. That's not what I asked for. A simple, "No, sorry" would have saved us both a lot of frustration, even though I would think that six hours into an outage they should at least have a clue. The discussion escalated, with the service guy constantly interrupting me before I could get my question out, while I tried to explain that I didn't care whose fault it was, I just wanted service back or credit on my bill for the hours I had lost. Finally he snarkily stated that he would give me credit, and asked if there was anything else he could do in a tone of voice that clearly indicated that he wasn't about to do anything for me. I told him yes, there was. I said he needed to get himself an attitude adjustment before taking any more calls, and that he was in the wrong line of work.
Now please, don't take this the wrong way. I worked in tech support for years. I answered phones for a living. I try very hard to be nice to the front-line folks. But this guy drove me nuts. He didn't answer any of my questions, and kept offering lame excuses that had nothing to do with the issue at hand. He then got increasingly rude to me. When I hung up the phone, I was ready to throttle something.
However, I try not to judge any company by one person, particularly by one person who was having a bad day. I waited an hour until I was completely calm, then called Comcast back. I got a female tech this time, but it sounded to me like my call was intercepted and transferred oddly. It didn't matter. I had only two questions. 1) Is there an ETA on repair? and 2) Will I get credit off my bill for the hours I've lost? I asked the new tech in the flatest voice possible (I even sounded flat to me) if they had an ETA yet. She asked me to wait a moment while she checked for new information, then said that the outage was due to a construction project severing an underground trunk line, and that repairs were taking longer than expected due to the nature of the cut, but they expected service would be up late that night. She then offered to credit me for the day of lost service, before I had a chance to ask. As I suspected, the first tech didn't give me credit even after saying he would, and when I mentioned that call, she apologized to me.
Now, folks, I may be overestimating my own importance, but I suspect that my first call was recorded, and that the information being put into the database was a direct result of that call. I also suspect that my phone number was flagged so if I called in again I'd get special service. I don't have any proof of that, but the odd noises on the phone when I called in the second time got my paranoia going. Whatever the reason, I was completely satisfied a minute into my second call. But you would think that, six hours into an outage that completely cut off all cable tv and internet in an entire town, the service techs would actually have more to say than "It's not our fault!" Oddly enough, seven hours into the outage, they did.
And service came back late in the night, around 11pm, about the time I finally decided to stop watching Angel and go to bed.
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