I dreamed last night that I was part of a travelling catering group. My job was to play guitar and sing for people at the party. I was supposed to walk around among them and play for them before the party really got going, but I felt that this was such a stupid and cheesy idea that I couldn’t bring myself to do it and I just sat down instead.

Then when the party was going I worked at one of the bars stationed around the room. My pay in that role was directly tied to how much alcohol I sold, but I didn’t feel like trying to get people to drink if they didn’t want to. So I wasn’t going to make as much as I could have, but when the thing was over I felt awkward about asking for my money since I just sat down during the walking around and playing guitar part, which is what I was originally hired to do.

I was also not accepted by the rest of the travelling catering group because they all worked very hard and I did nothing.

What an awkward-feeling dream.

Suzanne from Comcast replied to my earlier post about how bad their service is. It was all some crap that she pasted in from a list of stock responses, I have no doubt, but i read it nevertheless. Here’s a snippet:

The Comcast High-Speed Internet service was created and intended for non-commercial use. Comcast does not give refunds for any damages incurred due to improper or High Risk Activities through the cable modem service such as using the service for a business solution. As a result, some find the Comcast Business service better tailored to their needs as it has some options that the Comcast High-Speed Internet service is unable to offer.

So I decided to take her advice and check it out. The only problem was that I was unable to contact the fucking web server where they host their business solution sales pages. I REST MY FUCKING CASE, SUZANNE.

Here’s what I sent back:

Dear Susanne,

I appreciate your suggestion of Comcast’s business service as a better solution for someone who depends on their connection, but I offer to you the fact that I am currently unable to contact work.comcast.net (the site linked from your page which explains the comcast teleworker and small business products) as evidence that it’s not likely to be much better. Here’s a ping:

PING work.comcast.net (66.45.79.133) 56(84) bytes of data.

— work.comcast.net ping statistics —
6 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 4999ms

That’s a ping from inside your own network, Suzanne.

I have one more complaint regarding your company’s utter disregard for the value of my time. Whenever I am forced to call you, the automated system demands the phone number from my account, and yet the first thing I have to do when a real person picks up is give them the number again.

Having to call you and wait on hold is irritating and demeaning enough without being forced to repeat myself.

At least I am entertaining myself, I guess. I know very well that I’m just making work for some poor schlub who has to read my tirades. It’s probably a brokenhearted guy in his 50′s who has to work to pay for his medicine. THey make him say his name is Suzanne because some market research shows that customers are nicer to women.

TUNE UP THAT PACEMAKER, SUZIE. DADDY’S PISSED.

Here are some movies I have filmed with my digital camera. They are kind of big, and they are AVI’s, but they aren’t explosive as far as I know.

[ removed, links broken --jim ]

I am writing this email to you to tell you officially, in writing, that if my comcast connection goes down just one more time in the next 24 hours I am closing my account.

I have used your service successfully and without interruption for the past 3 months until the owner of that account moved out of this apartment. Since we have switched the account over to someone’s name who still resides here, it has been nothing but chaos.

First, your tech used my cell phone to call your people to get my MAC address added to your system and was on hold for over twenty minutes. This was during the day, so my cell minutes were getting used up all the while, despite the fact that he held some sort of radio in his hand. He also left without making it work. I thought at this point that I knew what it was to be an irritated customer, but now I look back upon those blissfull days as swaddled in the gossamer haze of naiveté.

Later in the day I was able to get my connection working after three or four successive calls to your customer care center, whereupon I was met with some of the rudest and least competant professional people it has ever been my displeasure to contact. Each one told me the problem would be fixed and to call back later if it wasn’t. Sometimes it did start working, but it would break again within a few hours. All the while my cell minutes were running, running, running, because each call entails a 20 minute wait on hold at the minimum. This is certainly cruel, but far from unusual with Comcast.

I would love to just relax and let the problem work itself out over the course of a few days, but the simple fact is that I work from my home and I desperately need internet connectivity in order to do so. I simply cannot upload completed work without it.

I have previously done my time in networking and computer support, and while I am by no means an expert, I have a few skills to apply when there is a networking problem. It is thusly that I am able to prove, by pinging your dns servers, that I don’t ever lose connectivity per se, just the ability to pass traffic to the internet. It is for this reason that I believe the problem is with getting your personnel and your system together to allow my mac address to talk to the internet. I suspect that the reason this problem keeps occurring is either operator error on the part of your substandard and apparently ill-managed technical representatives, or software error. I suspect the former.

I would suggest that your technical staff is comprised entirely of retarded and drug-addled lapdogs wearing phone headsets and flopping merrily about in a room lined with keyboards, but I know from experience that these people are merely trying to make a living and are not to blame for being dismally managed by a company with no moral compass whatsoever.

So, to sum up, I have used the entirety of my allotted cell phone minutes this month and completely overtaxed my patience all in the vain attempt to wrest from your company the internet service which I faithfully pay for. I am well aware that as an enormous cable company you do not care even in the slightest that I am taking my business elsewhere because if you pass enough homes you can pay the bills, but I hope that somewhere deep inside the bowels of your headquarters someone will read this letter and be ashamed at the deplorable, detestable mockery of customer care that your company puts forth.

Shame on you.

I am looking down on him from above, hovering or leaning over from the top of the stairs. His chair is on the landing and that’s where he sits, looking up through the ceiling as it’s long gone. The wood of the stairs is bleached and dry from being in the sun and his suit is torn and misshappen so you can see his wires. His metal body gleams in the places where it is visible, most notably his forehead.

His electric eyes glow faintly reddish brown and he just languidly regards the passing clouds through the missing roof

I know that he’s in love.

He has nothing to do since all the humans are long gone, so he goes on long exploratory walks around his house in neat concentric boxes. This method eventually took him down to the shore where he walked straight into the sea and met her there, chained to the sea floor.

He thinks of her as Henrietta, although she was never named. The humans didn’t name instruments of war usually, aside from numbers and dashes for inventory reasons. He thinks of this as vulgar, so she’s Henrietta. She’s waiting for her sensors to indicate that a warship is passing nearby so that she can explode enormously and tear it apart, but there are no longer any humans to drive such a ship.

Once he met her he stopped his concentric boxes, and now he just goes down to her every day until he has to come back and recharge. He’s working on the chain that has her so that she can come and live in his home with him, but it’s slow going. He has no tools, so he just scrapes with his hardened metal fingers. The chain metal is much lower quality, so he’s able to remove it bit by bit.

He sings to her as he works at her chain:

My lovely Henrietta, my gods have long expired
I will work until I free you, i swear upon my wires

His infinitely-repeated calculations indicate that she will be free in just under 94 years.

But this is merely a moment for an immortal robot and his undersea mine bride.