I really do intend to post more than this during this year. So why haven't I? Let me 'splain...
We had some new concrete work done and we're a little unsure how the water runoff is going to go until the "French Drain" guy turns up and Does Stuff to route the rainwater off somewhere else. Since I have no desire to have an art studio full of water but live in a place where the amount of rainfall is desperately unpredictable (ranging between Tunisian Desert and Lower 9th-Ward New Orleans), it seemed prudent to make sure that nothing untoward occurred until the final design was down and done.
So, a few days ago I sharpened up a couple of flat-end spades and dug a down-slope trench through the yard which, with any luck, will temporarily hold the fort until the aforementioned French Drain guy does his magic act.
As a result of me having spent a couple of hard hours ditch-digging, I fully anticipate that we will not see a drop of rain or other running water until well into next spring. The flip side, of course, is that if I hadn't dug it, I'd likely be piloting a rowboat across the art studio while bailing water out the back door right now. Which is just how shit happens in my life. No biggie.
Anyhow, I got done with the trench, took my accolades from The Beneficiary, took a quick shower, and sat down to update this blog. And found that my Internet connection is deader than Dillinger's dick.
Guess who sliced his Internet/TV/Whatnot cable into three chunks (one of which is exactly the same length as the trench is wide)? Yeah, THIS guy, that's who.
And yet again, we are reminded why I work for a living. It's so I can make enough money to hire people who know what the fuck they're doing.
Anyhow, still not online till tomorrow.
Ask me someday about the interaction I had with the pigeon-English-speaking Calcutta phone-bank "tech" interrupting me every 10 seconds while I was explaining why I needed someone to come to my house, and repeated explanations why no, I don't need to restart my computer and router and modem to resolve the problem. Many bad words were involved, and I expect I have vastly expanded his knowledge of colloquial English which, of course, will make him a more valuable asset to The Company.
But, for now, I was able to borrow a secure connection long enough to post this. You're welcome.
 |
| Not My Yard, But I Expect It Looks Kinda Like This |
So my old work mate at the phone company called a spade a ... canal wrench. And sometimes, if the hole was deep enough, you had to get down on the old prayer bones to finish up. Authentic Midwest gibberish. I"m here to say that operation pictured above looks vaguely familiar. I'm glad it's not me. Hope it's something quick and easy.
ReplyDeleteYeah, it was. Apparently I'm not the first dumbass out of the chute on this one -- the tech showed up, listened to the explanation from The Beneficiary (I was gone earning cable-replacement money) and shrugged and said "OK" just as if there were no dumbassery involved, and laid out new cable in about 10 minutes. He said he wasn't going to mess around and bury it until I was done putzing around with yard implements, but to give 'em a call when we were and they'd be along and finish it up. It was nice to see some competence in the yard, and a bit annoyed that it didn't involve me on any level.
DeleteGood deal. By the time you get past the call trees and the disinterested tech support and the remotely located minimum wage dispatchers, the person standing at your door with the tool belt on is normally actually interested in fixing the thing and moving on to their coffee break.
ReplyDeletePro Tip! I've discovered that if instead of asking for "Technical Support", which dumps you into the aforesaid snake-pit of a phone-tree, the main function of which is to keep you from wasting real people's time with your petty bullshit, you should ask for "Purchase New Services". An actual human answers nearly instantly, because selling you shit is VASTLY more important than customer support of any kind. And that human is actually trained to try to get along with you as he's trying to con money out of you, which means when you blow-torch him from toenails to hairline over the half-assed company he works for and remind him how little commission he's going to be making if he wants to hang out and hear your whole tale of woe, he practically crawls through his own asshole trying to find you a supervisory tech to talk to.
DeleteWhen you borrowed a secure connection, I envisioned one stretched over from your neighbor, strung through the trees the way California's first telegraph line ran between mountain towns during the gold rush. Yes, cables stretch. Wait, no they don't. Aha.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of blog site complaints, I just realized it's blogspot I have trouble with. The Sign Out button is where Publish ought to be and I've hit it enough times to space more material than Marco Inaros' Free Navy.
Yeah, you're not the first to rag me about Blogger, nor, I imagine, the last, most of which revolve around the CAPTCHA thinger. But I'm a selfish prick, and it's cut my spam to zero.
Delete(shrug) I can find some pretty good blog hosting services out on Dark Web that I don't have to go through a gigantic pain in the ass to sign up for anonymously and are generally free of these kinds of annoyances but, really, who's going to visit out there? I can barely get anyone in through the door here. I strongly suspect that if I were handing out $10.00 bills at the entry, I'd still see little enough throughput, so restricting what few there are by making them use a TOR Browser to access my ".onion" site would be counter-productive.
So, to put anything out at all, apparently we each have to just put up with whatever version of annoyance falls within our "tolerable" ranges.
Oh, and I forgot to mention, by "secure" connection, I meant I wrote it, sanitized the metadata out and dropped it to a stone-simple HTML-based text file, and borrowed a work computer to use two thumbdrive-based layered virtual drives running a portable Whonix installation to post it from an address in Spain. The picture and caption were the hard part.
DeleteA walk in the park, really, but I'd rather not do it that way if I can avoid chopping up my own infrastructure.