About Fred

Friday, November 30: I call AT&T@Home customer support. Their online help page will not load and I am concerned about a possible disruption in service. A representative tells me that no, the recent bankruptcy of Excite@Home will not affect my service and I will not be disconnected from the Internet.

Saturday, December 1: I am disconnected from the Internet. Calling AT&T again, a recording informs that I will be without service for as much as a week, as they transition their customers to the new AT&T Broadband network. They apologize for the delay and promise to credit my account two full days for each day I am without a connection.

Sunday, December 2: Another recording, saying basically the same thing but cut off at the beginning, is left on my answering machine while I am out.

Monday, December 3: I spend the day at a tedious new employee orientation session, learning how to help customers (in this case, apparently, the University’s students) by more or less eliminating them from the equation. It is not fun.

Tuesday, December 4: Since I still have an Internet connection at work, I try AT&T’s online help page again. This time it loads. A notice informs me that customers in Pennsylvania should be transitioned to the new network by Thursday, December 6. I grumble a little but move on.

Thursday, December 6: I am still without an Internet connection at home. The transition has apparently not occurred.

Friday, December 7: I have dinner with my boss and co-workers to celebrate the holidays and wish a departing team member goodbye. It is a little late when I get home, and am I tired. I watch some television, fall asleep on the couch, and I am only a little annoyed that my cable modem is still not working.

Saturday, December 8: I call AT&T customer support. A recording tells me that the average wait for help is thirty minutes but that my call is important and will be transferred. When I am finally transferred, it is to another recording. This one tells me that the number I have dialed has changed. Except it hasn’t. The number this recording gives me is the number I originally dialed. They hang up. I try again. Eventually I am connected to a different recording: “If you are calling from a touchtone phone, press 1 now.” I do so and am connected to yet another recorded message. This one ecourages me to visit AT&T’s online help page if I still have questions about the transition to the new broadband network. Since the light on my cable modem is still blinking, and I am still unable to access the Internet, I stay on the line. I am asked to enter my ten-digit phone number if I am an existing AT&T customer. I do so, press 1 to confirm, and then I am told to press 2 if I am having trouble connecting to the Internet. The recording then tells me that I may be inadvertently disconnected from the system because of the increased call volume. I am again encouraged to visit the online help page if I can still connect to the Internet. The irony of this no longer amuses me. I spend a couple of hours on hold, listening to cheesy ’80s music and the occasional recorded message, losing at Solitaire while I wait, and giving up eventually. My time is better spent, I decide, by going to see Ocean’s Eleven in a downtown theater. I enjoy the movie immensely. I come home, order a pizza, and decide to call AT&T customer support again. I go through everything I went through in the morning, but eventually I am connected to a real person. She, too, asks for my ten-digit telephone number. She asks for my name. I am not connected to the Internet, I tell her, and it has been more than a week since the connection was severed. While I appreciate the situation that AT&T is in and understand the delay, I wonder if she has any information she might be able to share with me regarding my account. She has no information. I will be contacted when the transition occurs, she says. Oh, I say. Thanks. She thanks me for calling and I hang up.

Sunday, December 9: Because I need to check my e-mail and pick up a diskette I left there on Friday, I go in to the office. I check the AT&T online help page. It loads an error message. I try again. And again. And again. Eventually, the online customer support center loads. “As of December 6, 2001,” one message reads, “the markets below may be delayed in service transition. Customers in the specified markets who will be without service for more than a few days will receive a WorldNet CD and free WorldNet dial-up service until their service is transitioned. The WorldNet CDs should arrive around Friday, December 7, 2001.” State College, Pennsylvania, the market in which I happen to live, is scheduled for service transition on Thursday, December 14. The WorldNet CD has not arrived.

Someone very recently found my site by searching for “princess buttercup naked”, and I can’t help but be grateful that it wasn’t “inigo montoya naked” or “the dread pirate roberts naked”. I’m not sure I could have handled that.

It’s a little after two o’clock, and I am once again trying to will it to be five o’clock, using the awesome mental superpowers with which, it should by now be abundantly clear, the universe has not seen fit to grant me. A full two minutes have passed since I first sat down to write this, but that isn’t really the same thing as making it be five o’clock through the sheer force of one’s will, and it still leaves me with almost two hundred more minutes to fill up before the end of the day. I’ve spent most of today retyping addresses to create mailing labels for the books we have on order (and which we plan to ship out after they arrive sometime next week), but there’s only so much of that you can do before you go mad, blind, or both. So I’ve been puttering around online, trying to stave off boredom, hoping to get through to the end of the day, and halfheartedly cursing my luck for not having been born with mind-boggling powers of telepathy, telekinesis, or whatever it is one would use to make three hours pass by in a flash. What do people with real jobs do with their time?

Happy birthday, Willa Cather.

The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still,—and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, under one’s feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere ant-hills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!

– Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

And happy birthday, Tom Waits.

Well things are pretty lousy for a calendar girl

The boys just dive right off the cars and splash into the street

And when they’re on a roll she pulls a razor from her boot

And a thousand pigeons fall around her feet

So put a candle in the window and a kiss upon his lips

As the dish outside the window fills with rain

Just like a stranger with the weeds in your heart

And pay the fiddler off ’til I come back again

– Tom Waits, Time