And the Monkey Flips the Switch

We live in a technological age.

Allegedly.

I am discovering the limits of technology in a most personal and frustrating way right now. It has been made painfully obvious to me just how dependent I am upon the Internet to conduct daily business, news, and contact with the outside world.

Despite having DSL and then switching to a higher speed Internet service which should have made our lives better, we now have NEITHER the lower speed, nor the higher speed which was advertised as being “oh so much better”.

Trust me, it’s NOT better. It’s worse.

Instead of having slow and intermittent service, we now have NO service at all of any kind. With Rick back in school and our son Thomas at a school in another state, this service interruption has ground our communications to a standstill. It also hampers my ability to play online Scrabble, a minor consideration, but a consideration nonetheless.

I’ve never felt so ‘Stone Age’ in my life.

In our nation, we have the technology to send men to the moon and communicate with them at distance yet we lack the ability to transact a single simple request for home Internet service that is both reliable and fast. Where have we gone wrong?

For crying out loud, I can go to Burger King and transact a “hold the pickles” order of the   most odd combinations and get exactly what I describe from people who have not yet graduated from high school however this technological flip of the switch is apparently beyond the skill level of the kind people at the phone company who are supposed to be ahead of the curve on their brilliance in all things modern.

I am decidedly NOT amused.

Where are the trained monkeys who led the world in space flight? Ms. Baker, where are you when we need you most? Oh, yeah, you are dead… which probably explains our lack of noise free phone and Internet service since you aren’t here to make certain the proper sequence of switch flipping has occurred. Maybe it’s time to revisit our employment standards and stop discriminating against our simian brethren. They could hardly do worse than their allegedly more evolved relations.

Now, the delightful young man from Bangladesh who is definitely not named Robert assures me that I will not be billed for this ‘service interruption’ and that they are doing all in their power to assist me in this request for help.

May I please have a monkey?

I have bananas to pay for the assistance rendered.

I am currently on hold… the eternal game of patience in suffering. The idea is to see just how long you are willing to put your entire life at a standstill in order to hear someone in a clogged call center in the basement of the Hotel Bangalore reassure me that my concerns matter to them.

I’m not buying it.

They don’t care or they would have fixed this mess the first gazillion times we called begging for help. I realize that they work for Satan, but I’m beginning to see that for most of them, they not only love their work, but they love their boss as well. I can see them standing by the water cooler laughing over how many transfers they can put you through before you lose the will to live. “Yes, Mujibar, I completed 17 transfers through the entire department, through billing and through the customer complaint hotline before ‘accidentally’ cutting off her connection right when we were about to ‘resolve’ her issues!” Hilarity ensues as the backslapping and high-fiving one another gives way to sitar music and dancing until the next call rings in.

Why do we put up with any of this nonsense?

In reality, we put up with it because we don’t really have an alternative to the phone company. They are evil and they know it and they revel in that knowledge because they know that we don’t have any other choices. Even our cellular service goes through Beelzebub’s phone company.

I yearn for the simpler days when hope sprang eternal that one day we would have flying cars, food replicators and endless energy supplies through dilithium crystals. I yearn for the days when we understood that although our relatives are more hirsute than we are, they are actually the ones in charge as scenes from “Planet of the Apes” scroll through my mind. Now, they are saying it could be 7 to 10 more DAYS before they are able to ‘address your issues’. Bull. They have the power. They just don’t want to wield it in my behalf because I lack the ability to choose something better than the demons and imps at the phone company to provide the services I desire to have.

So we are back to square one. Waiting. And waiting some more. The music from “2001: A Space Odyssey” begins to fill my thoughts as I picture simians in jumpsuits driving phone company trucks… and the monkey flips the switch… I just wish he’d get to our particular switch a little faster.