As I sit here at the laptop with Freebird playing on my noise cancelling earmuffs, Hope the TharpSter Pit Bull sits here at my side demanding attention. If she’s not uttering guttural growls and whimpers, she’s nuzzling my arm in an effort to jack up the verbal brilliance I commit to Microsoft OneNote.
The jury is still out on which entity between Hope and OneNote is a bigger attention seeking hand-whore. OneNote has been accused by my laptop to be a CPU gobbler, while Hope likes to gobble stuff which has been scattered indiscriminately throughout the back yard as a function of metabolism.
Even still, neither of them come anywhere close to my current internet connection. Something is going on with it where nothing on line wants to load. The stupid circle on the stupid tab just continues to rotate in it’s menacing clockwise fashion which makes me appreciate digital clockwork all the more.
I harken back to the glorious days of dial up when pages loaded with the speed of bran flakes through a colon. I’ve considered going on an exploration into the garage for Junior’s baby book where we may have put a free AOL disk (3.5 inch) received in the mail on the day of his birth. The idea then was to present it to him later on in life and say something eloquent like “See how bad it used to be?” We would then explain to him that the disk was not a coaster, and move on with our lives.
The mere fact that I even bothered to use ‘AOL’ and ‘glorious days’ in the same paragraph is a key indicator to me that my relationship with my internet provider has become a codependent one littered with repeated calls to customer service agents who’s first reaction to my tragic story is to muster up a false sense of empathy to cover up their apathy.
It’s not my computer either. Believe me, I’ve checked. The other two laptops here in the domain are experiencing the same phenomenon (or Mah-na mah-na, take your pick). They work fine in other places which provide WiFi service.
Sadly, it took me a few months of unassailable common sense and logic to get my provider to remove an erroneous charge from my bill. The thought of calling them back up so they can butcher my name ad nauseam (that’s one of those bitchin’ italicized Latin phrases if you didn’t catch it) for an hour of my precious time that I could spend doing other stuff like scraping the rack on the new grill or guzzling Kool Aid out of the jug in the fridge. It just doesn’t seem to be worth it.
Regardless of what I do to get it fixed, I will soldier on in getting these daily blogs posted throughout this calendar year.
On a side note, it should probably go without saying that TharpSter.Org was launched three years ago this month. The traditional anniversary gift for three years according to About.com is leather.
Im sure there’s a dead cow joke there somewhere. I’m just waiting for one of my browsers to deliver it.
