Thank the good lord, it's over.
No, not winter, not some horrible disease, not my diet nor my diet-related sobriety. No, what is over is trivial, luxurious, and a technological product of this century:
Cable installation is complete.
Why, you may ask, was getting cable installed so difficult?
Apparently, this house was built by blind carpenters with dyslexic electricians and designed by an architect who feared that phone and cable jacks might cost thousands, nay, millions of dollars to install. Therefore, we have no cable jack in the office and no phone jack in the family room.
Thus, the computers (per the ignoramus who did day 1 of installation) had to be on a wireless network. Which meant that they approached the neck breaking speed of the Internet in 1997. Honestly, I tried to post yesterday, but the page took so long to load, I forgot what I was going to say.
So, Installer 1, after being no less than 2 hours later than the 3 hour window he was scheduled for (I'll do the math for ya, that's 5 hours of my waiting) shows up and does a half-assed job. He assured us that local hi-def is a futuristic dream, and that the on-screen guide will never advance more than 30 minutes ahead of the current time. The phone jacks are not activated, and he explained that we have to have our phone in the kitchen attached to world's biggest modem whence the faintest of Internet wireless connections emits.
By the time that wireless signal migrated through the walls of my living room and dining room and office, it was as though the Internet was being delivered via camel across the Sahara. Needless to say, M was IRATE.
IRATE called Comcast and spoke to Carla. While I saw that IRATE was curbing his emotion and being pretty calm by IRATE standards, Carla is probably now in work-sponsored PTSD therapy. "Carla, it's just that you, and by you I mean Comcast, not you personally, LIED TO ME!" "Carla, it's just that DirecTV offered these services while you were still an infant and Comcast still doesn't offer them." "No, Carla watching a game in standard definition is like being trapped in the 1980s. I absolutely will NOT do that."
Carla must have flagged our file with every known warning and alert signal: red flags, sirens, klaxons. Wednesday, a nice enough and seemingly competent guy showed up at the house a mere 2 hours late. He assured me that the Internet should be blazing fast and that the TV guide should advance into the future, and that the Brigadoon of hi-def local channels does exist.
I was very excited until he told me that he was a supervisor and that he couldn't actually complete the necessary adjustments. He scheduled a technician appointment window of 4 to 7 PM. Which is fine, because then that guy would get to deal with IRATE himself. Which is good, because it always seems like women are home during these service calls and not able to convince these guys that either a) we know what we're talking about or b) there will be consequence to doing inferior work.
At 6, in the middle of dinner, 2 MORE technicians show up and proceed to actually fulfill the promise of functioning cable-fed media access. It was glorious. The Internet access, while not blazing fast (because we are sharing the router) is indeed peppy, the phone service seems to function, and the television, while not providing all of the hi-def visual orgy that we had anticipated, is slightly above adequate.
Throughout this hellacious experience, my mind kept wandering back to a conversation I had with a painter many moons ago. You'll wonder, when I tell you about this chat, how exactly the topic came up, but it's not what you think.
We were mutually complaining about the vapid existence of the Springhill Women. Their superficiality, their extreme bitchiness toward lesser beings, their unreasonable expectation of being treated as The Only Customer In The World. It's not like we were spooning or anything.
He said that I would not believe the number of Springhill (and other) women who come onto him and people he knows while they were working in their homes. Like, as in aggressive, cougarish, blatantly sexual advances.
Which stunned me. Not because I don't think that Springhill women are normally drunk by 9 AM, lonely, and simultaneously repressed and horny as hell, but because their targets seem so, well, inadequate.
Why would a woman want to throw herself at a man barely capable of doing his job?!? I mean, I'm lookin' at these cable dudes, and thinking, if I could get them to change the oil in my car, that'd be something, but I'm sure I'd not want them up under my hood, if ya know what I mean. The confused look on their faces when confronted by wires of different colors and the total bafflement of getting a phone to ring and the miles and miles of butt crack makes for a far FAR freakin' jump to the ol' sack.
Plus, the total unreliability. Not to be vulgar, but they never come when they're supposed to! Which is why those Springhillian femmes are so uptight in the first place--they have husbands with the same problem. Plus, the technicians need to do everything by committee. At the onset of confusion, which in my last 2 days' experience has been very rapid, they hop on that push to talk Nextel crap and ask for help. Does THAT inspire bedroom confidence? "Um, Joe? I got a problem here. Ima lookin' at a box and UH, I dunno whichaway to install it."
In short, I am amazed that the painter and his home service industry cohorts are in such high demand for extra-marital affairs. It seems that they embody the worst aspects of the worst husbands: they don't care about what you want, they want to do everything in the easiest way possible for them, they want to finish up quick and head home for beer.
I am amazed, too, that these high-falutin' women really do go for the tattooed, cigarette smokin', beer reekin', butt-crack havin' home service technicians. They must really have it bad at home. No wonder they're stoned and walking down the middle of Old Shell Road in their matching outfits. They're commiserating about what a lousy lay the plumber was.
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