Monday, December 22, 2003
(11:01 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Patience
I am learning patience right now. First, I am learning patience from Comcast High-Speed Internet, which came to "hook up my service" today, by which I mean drop off a cable modem, verify that it works, alert me to the fact that their entire network is currently down, give me instructions in how to register the modem myself -- then run off before I realize that the modem is, in fact, defective. They could get to me maybe around next Monday. The guy who came to my house was really nice, and the two people I've talked to on the phone were really nice, but the company itself appears to have the sickness unto death pretty badly.
Second, I am learning patience from SBC Yahoo! Dialup service, which I am using because the AOL software included with Windows ME apparently doesn't work, and neither does the Prodigy, and I certainly wasn't going to use the AT&T service that came preinstalled, because AT&T is the devil. I have a Mastercard through them that came with a calling card -- $50 of free calls. I thought that would be a lot of time, but it turns out it was somewhere around $20 a minute. I talked much more than two and a half minutes, and my credit card bill was huge by my sophomoric standards. I called them and said, "Don't you think that rate is a little high?" They said, "That's our rate." AT&T also used to do the high-speed Internet crap around here, and they were a nightmare to work with. Comcast has kept up the proud tradition.
That's my bitching post for the moment. I don't know why I didn't think to sign up for a dial-up service temporarily before -- all of them offer the first month for free. Perhaps I just wanted the peace and quiet. At the same time that the Internet is a wonderful way of staying connected to people, it's also a tether. I enjoy running this blog and hope to get re-involved in all the comment-section intrigues (and incidentally to get some referrals again), but I think having a week pretty much off has done me some good. I've spent more time cooking decent meals that include vegetables, I've read some stuff, I've bonded with my cat, and up until tonight, I had no uncontrollable fits of rage.
