The case of the bad electricity...
If you try and send any urgent and important information via email tonight, thanks, but I won't get it. It's been raining for 20 hours and this has apparently knocked my phone service out. No phone=no dial-up modem=no Internet. I called SW Bell this morning at some 800 number phone tree in Haiti or somewhere close. There they give you a state of the art computerized automated systems analysis [TelcoSysAn] of your phone status, which in this case generated the very helpful...."an equipment problem..good bye". So I called back on the phone tree and punched #1 to get an English speaking human. Had I punched #2 I would have gotten a Spanish speaking human. Having tried to use the phone in Mexico once, I have a hunch that English speakers know more about phone electricity than Spanish speakers. I related the problem and told her I thought it had to do with the rain. She say's no she thought that I had some bad electricity or something.
I have been chided already [see below] for believing this, but we have had electrical problems in the neighborhood, with service lapses several times a month so with the hope of the naive, I wanted to believe it was so. But to continue, when you have bad electricity apparently the proceedure is to go home and unplug all phones and the computer....to let them rest and get the bad electricity out. Which is what I did at lunch. You will not be surprised to learn that this did absolutely nothing except create a lot of unplugging and replugging for me. Not to mention the fact that I was very worried about the environmental impact. Just where does all this bad electricity go when it escapes from communication equipment?
So back to the office I went where I waded thru the whole stinkin' phone tree procedure again....finally talk to another humanoid, explaining that I got the bad electricity out...and the service was still a NO GO. "Oh" she says, "it's probably the rain, we'll have someone out...tomorrow, at the exact time of between 8 AM and 5 PM..so stand by". And so I wasted a whole half day today and a half whole day tomorrow on some bogus bad electricity theory!! But hey, it could have been true, those people in Haiti know alot about electricity....and Voodoo.
Can you hear me now?
Here is the comment on the bad electricity theory by best selling author Joe Galloway, in which, with metaphorical literary skill, he alludes to the fact that I might be a moron:
If you try and send any urgent and important information via email tonight, thanks, but I won't get it. It's been raining for 20 hours and this has apparently knocked my phone service out. No phone=no dial-up modem=no Internet. I called SW Bell this morning at some 800 number phone tree in Haiti or somewhere close. There they give you a state of the art computerized automated systems analysis [TelcoSysAn] of your phone status, which in this case generated the very helpful...."an equipment problem..good bye". So I called back on the phone tree and punched #1 to get an English speaking human. Had I punched #2 I would have gotten a Spanish speaking human. Having tried to use the phone in Mexico once, I have a hunch that English speakers know more about phone electricity than Spanish speakers. I related the problem and told her I thought it had to do with the rain. She say's no she thought that I had some bad electricity or something.
I have been chided already [see below] for believing this, but we have had electrical problems in the neighborhood, with service lapses several times a month so with the hope of the naive, I wanted to believe it was so. But to continue, when you have bad electricity apparently the proceedure is to go home and unplug all phones and the computer....to let them rest and get the bad electricity out. Which is what I did at lunch. You will not be surprised to learn that this did absolutely nothing except create a lot of unplugging and replugging for me. Not to mention the fact that I was very worried about the environmental impact. Just where does all this bad electricity go when it escapes from communication equipment?
So back to the office I went where I waded thru the whole stinkin' phone tree procedure again....finally talk to another humanoid, explaining that I got the bad electricity out...and the service was still a NO GO. "Oh" she says, "it's probably the rain, we'll have someone out...tomorrow, at the exact time of between 8 AM and 5 PM..so stand by". And so I wasted a whole half day today and a half whole day tomorrow on some bogus bad electricity theory!! But hey, it could have been true, those people in Haiti know alot about electricity....and Voodoo.
Can you hear me now?
Here is the comment on the bad electricity theory by best selling author Joe Galloway, in which, with metaphorical literary skill, he alludes to the fact that I might be a moron:
"....Bad electricity?? Unplug all yer equipment and let it rest????? Next thing they will be tellin ya to put your phone handset in the wastebasket cause they are about to blow out the line and you doan want all that dust in yore house. We usta pull that one on old ladies. ......."
