Internet issues

For those of you who actually read this thing, let me take a second to apologize for leaving you rant-free for a couple of weeks. While part of my slacking can be attributed to general life craziness, another contributing factor to the recent lack of Meat has been the lack of an Internet connection.

Let’s backtrack for a second. I just moved to a new apartment, where I’m supposed to stay for a couple of months (long story, I’m not getting into it). Included in my rent was Internet service, only with one small issue: the Internet wasn’t really working – well, not consistently, anyway. At first, rather than deal with the cable company, I tried to work around the fact that my connection would just drop out randomly throughout the day. After a couple of days, that routine got old, especially when I found myself losing service for hours upon hours at a time.

I first called my friends at the cable company on Tuesday and set up an appointment for a service technician to come out to my place on Wednesday between 11:00 and 2:00. Naturally, the guy showed up at 4:45. I waited indoors while the guy fumbled around with the connection and eventually reported it to be fixed. Yippee. Back in business.

Then Thursday came around, and there I was, sitting at my desk typing away, when BAM – bye bye Internet. So I called the cable company again. Their response, of course, was “but didn’t the guy fix it yesterday?”

“Yes, that’s why I’m calling you – because the Internet is all better now and I had nothing else to do with my time.”

Around 5:00pm yesterday, service technician #2 showed up at my door in an attempt to fix the problem. At first, we got off to a bit of a rocky start.

“Which of those wires is yours?” he asked me, pointing to the series of cables hanging from a tree above my apartment.

“Um…sorry…I have no idea,” I replied, wondering if I was the idiot for not knowing that, or if he was the idiot for assuming that I would actually know that.

Since I didn’t have the answer, the guy had no choice but to take a “trial and error” approach, messing with each one until he found the source of my service. Each time he disconnected a wire, he would shout down from his ladder for me to run inside and check to see if his actions had affected my service. While I didn’t mind playing an active role in the Internet repair process, it was rather daunting to watch this guy dangling a few dozen feet in the air from a harness that was loosely attached to a ladder – a ladder whose sole bracing point was a not so heavy-looking cable shooting across the treetops.

Now I know that sometimes cables are stronger than they look – after all, don’t cable cars carry hundreds of pounds worth of people across theme parks on a daily basis? But still, I couldn’t help but get kind of freaked out watching the guy. As much as I wanted my Internet back, it certainly wasn’t worth risking this guy’s life.

Eventually, the guy safely finished up what he was doing. My service, for now, has been restored, though that’s what I also thought the first time around. In other words, I won’t be shocked to find myself calling the cable company for the third time in one week, but for right now, the Internet is working, and so I am finally able to post.

For those of you who have been sitting at your desks for the past couple of weeks, just hopelessly staring at your monitors waiting for a dose of sarcasm to provide a break from your otherwise monotonous 9 to 5 existence – I’m sorry to have let you down. Just know that I have been thinking of you, all the while letting my obnoxious thoughts build up so that when the time came for me to return to the blogging world, I’d be well-equipped with ample material. More on that next week.