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08/14/2002: I'm glad to have working DSL again
By now I've mostly caught up with mail and blogs, and I've fully recovered from my internet withdrawal crankiness. =) My DSL had been down from Friday morning to mid-Tuesday, and to get it fixed or rather to get someone from the company to fix it wasn't easy with their byzantine corporate labyrinth. I mean, it isn't a sinister enough bureaucracy for it to merit the description kafkaesk, more like absurd theater, or that bureaucratic agency in the Asterix comic that causes people to go mad. The most annoying thing (well almost, the music you're subjected to while on hold tops the list) was that they kept asking me for stupid Windows(TM) error messages, and never knew what to do when I told them I was using linux. Obviously their protocol somehow demands that they get a error message from the company's own Windows program to proceed, and they had real problems with me telling them that I could see from my log that it was no error of my system and that besides I hadn't even changed anything, when it just stopped working one morning. It didn't help that the company providing the DSL line isn't the internet provider (well they are sort of interwoven, after all they both were part of the former state monopolist, but they insist on not having anything to do with each other when it comes to errors *snort*) and they consequently tried pinning the fault on each other each time I called one of their support services, and it's not as if there was just one service number for each company either, so I was on hold each time I called one of their half a dozen numbers (and not all were toll free).
Not that the process of fixing my DSL was without hitches even after I finally managed to get hold of the right department and talk to someone besides phone operators, but well, it wasn't that interesting, just the sort of semi-funny tale you tell when you commiserate with others about the strangeness and absurdity of bureaucracies and daily life. So I'll skip the details.
On the (kind of) positive side, I did the whole heap of dirty dishes that had accumulated in my kitchen, did a lot of laundry, cleaned up my apartment etc. That undoubtedly contributed to the aforementioned crankiness of my internet-less state. I had a hard time to procrastinate housework as usual. Usually I'm not quite that addicted to the net, when I do fun things, like vacations or such, I have little problems to be offline for weeks.
And I finally found time to read "Watchmen" by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, a comic that I had meant to read for years, but somehow never got around to before. Somehow I always have at least a couple of dozen unread comics and can never quite keep up with reading. Also not being able to look for fanfic to read led to some additional time for other reading, so I read "Twelve Years" by Joel Agee. Quite an interesting and unusual perspective on the GDR.
Posted by RatC @ 10:53 PM CET
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I really enjoyed "Watchmen." I first read it about 7 years ago, and I try to re-read it every few years; it's a good one. :-)
By the way, I've been meaning to mention that every time I see your pseud, I smile, because I am so fond of Jeff Smith's "Bone."
Posted by Kass @ 08/15/2002 04:42 AM CET
