Humor by John Christmann
King Of The Information Superhighway
Trailers for sale or rent
Rooms to let fifty cents.
No phone, no pool, no pets
I ain’t got no Internet . . .
I can’t get the Roger Miller song, King of the Road, out of my head. Since hurricane Irene blew through town I have been without an electronic lifeline. A tree fell across the cable that moors my existence to the digital world and I have been abruptly cast adrift.
It could be worse. My basement could be flooded and I could be sitting on a pile of moldy carpets and warped furniture right now in the dark without power. But I was smart. I stayed up all night and bailed water with my family until the light of day finally filtered down the stairwell.
Ah but, twelve hours of pushing brooms
Buys an eight by twelve dry bedroom.
I’m a man of means by no means
King of the road
Eventually the power returned when I no longer really needed it and my computer revived so I could respond to digital inquiries from concerned friends and relatives. That’s when I discovered no one was concerned.
As silly as it seems, you don’t really know how much you need the Internet until you have to live without it. It’s like being deprived of blood without the downside. But in the moment it seems dire, as if our very arteries are comprised of nothing but red corpuscles and email.
My service provider, Comcast, was not very helpful. After several calls I managed to get a knowledgeable supervisor who assured me that technicians were working on the problem, even if she was unclear exactly what they were doing or where they were. That was ten days ago.
Third phone call, midnight hour
Destination . . . Bangalore
Old worn out mouse and keys
I don’t pay no usage fees
I remember a camping trip I took a few years ago when I inadvertently left the grid. No WiFi. No cell phone. For a couple of days I tried to use a fishing pole as an antenna to order some takeout sushi. I finally grew hungry and threw my phone at a fish.
But warming my hands over a trashcan fire under the dark sky I finally felt at peace in the vast, incomprehensible universe devoid of man-made wireless signals.
And then a satellite loped faintly across the night, a domesticated star lumbering methodically across the heavens like a shooting cell tower.
As frustrating as losing signal is, I can’t be upset. It is a lot worse for others. A lot worse. Before the storm many people faced mortgages that were underwater. After the storm, their entire homes were underwater.
A healthy cable connection won’t fix their problems. Not unless Al Gore invents some Internet homeless shelters among the racks of humming servers located in dry, secure data centers.
And to make things more humiliating, these poor people have to deal with customer representatives from banks, insurance companies, utilities, and worse, FEMA.
I know every service rep and all of their names
All their excuses, and all of their games
And every hotspot in every town
And passwords that ain’t locked
When no one’s around, I sing . . .
In the mean time I have been wandering the neighborhood streets with my laptop loitering idly outside lighted homes without dogs in search of five-bar, unsecured signals like a wireless vampire.
Honest officer, the computer is mine.
In my desperate search for invisible signals I am not alone. There is a line outside Starbucks. A wimpy Wifi customer reaches the counter and pleads with the barista, “I’d gladly pay you Tuesday for an Internet connection today . . .”
It’s time to move on down the road. There must be Internet at the library. There has to be; there are whole computers there that do nothing but search for books. Maybe I can find a reference manual on surviving without the Internet.
There are no seats there either. And the reference manual is only available on Amazon.
I snag old cables I have found
Short, but not too big around.
I’m a man of means by no means
King of the Road
Desperate, I return to my home and yank free the house-end of the cable that is wedged among the crushed lilies under the large fallen tree across the yard. I hold the severed end of the cable near my laptop. Surely there must still be some leaky signals in there.
I realize helplessly that I am at the mercy of ineffective representatives hiding behind 800 numbers. In a pique of frustration I transplant all my dead flowers around the idle roadside utility pole and call it in as a service complaint.
I'm a man of means by no means . . .
© 2011 Dadinthebox.com