Just to soothe the outrage of all my paid subscribers¹ who have suffered through several days with no China Hearsay posts, let me set the record straight. I have not been in a major traffic accident, been abducted by aliens, or been out of the country doing classified work for Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

No, none of these things has been occupying my time over the past several days. In fact, I was honest early last week when I bitched and moaned about my impending apartment move and that, with all the house painting and such, I’d be tied up for a couple of days.

Well, “a couple” turned out to be more like “a few,” and the move was a bit more traumatic than I thought. I am writing this from the new digs, and using the new Internet connection, so I consider myself lucky. However, the most difficult part of the process has yet to be played out — our “exit interview” with The Landlord From Hell, scheduled for 2:00pm this afternoon. (More on that later.)

Aside from that incredibly bizarre experience, the only other true idiocy I’ve encountered over the past few days was dealing with the phone company. We had to call up to order new Internet service, after we had gone to the bank to pay the appropriate fees. Sounds fairly straightforward, right? Tell ‘em your address, and they hook you up.

Well, not so fast. I had been operating on the mistaken impression that all we had to do was start Internet service, which could be handled with a phone call. It turns out that I was mistaken.

Apparently, what I thought was a single request (i.e. turning on Internet service) was actually three services rolled into one and cleverly disguised as a single service. This was patiently explained to my wife (who was rolling her eyes at the time) who did the honors and made the call.

The three services were:

1) turn on Internet service

2) specify bandwidth

3) obtain username and password

Sure, you might be thinking: “How can you have Internet service without a specific bandwidth so they know what to charge you?” and “What would be the point of any of this if they didn’t give you a username and password so you could login and actually use the service?” That may sound reasonable, but apparently not to bureaucrats at a State-owned Enterprise.

OK, so it’s really three separate services. So what? The upshot was that three separate phone calls were required. Mind you, not to separate departments or anything, just three separate phone calls, which would be logged in as separate service requests. The customer rep on the phone even cautioned that we could not simply call back immediately; the phone company’s computers would interpret that as the same “service visit,” and count it as one call. We were advised, therefore, to wait at least ten minutes in between the phone calls. Everything went smoothly after we bought in to the bureaucratic structure.

Woof. Anyway, all’s well that ends well, I suppose.

Wish me luck for my 2:00pm meeting. Since my landlord, in all her mentally unstable glory, refused to “release” my furniture yesterday, we ended up sleeping on the sofa in the new place last night (I am not making this up). Should be fun.
________________________________

1. of which I have none[↩]

________________________________