When All Connect #Santa #Fe doesn't

When I called All Connect to find out why we had not been visited by their technician on the agreed-upon day and time, I was told that our order for television and Internet connections had been put on hold.

I inquired, “When were you going to tell me that we were on hold?”

Answer, “I’m informing you now that it was put on hold a week ago.”  I was glad to finally get that information.

“Why was it put on hold?”

“I was not given a reason on what I have in front of me.”

So I called the phone company again and was given the name and phone number of Comcast, a service that might install both cable TV and Internet access.  

The woman I talked to at Comcast tsked-tsked, adding that All Connect had a terrible reputation.   She guaranteed on the grave of her mother (which, I believe, already had wireless Internet connections for any emails from The Beyond) that Comcast would do a far better job. 

I was reminded of going to a new dentist when I was a kid.  The first observation from the new tooth-puller was that all fillings by all other dentists who worked on my mouth were amateurish, dangerous and needed to be removed before my overbite allowed me only to audition for the Blue Collar Comedy tour audience.

However, despite all the promises of being the better company, as far as Comcast was concerned, I was a new customer and would have to be on the bottom of their technician’s considerable waiting list.  Any installation was at least two weeks away.

I reluctantly agreed.  During that time, I continued going to the local El Dorado library that had several computers on which to read my email.  It was far from a perfect solution.

I was concerned about the titles of the emails from my friends that I might open in that small, almost intimate public library staffed by friendly El Dorado volunteers.  What if I opened the joke about the prostitute and the Pope and that traumatized an innocent nine-year-old lad who went to the library to play the computer game Sponge Bob Square Pants: The Battle for the Bikini Bottom?   Rather than being banned from the library, I threw away all jokes without opening them, even the ones with a subject line  “I laughed so hard I wet my pants.”   

I couldn’t order additional films from NetFlix.  This was becoming important because we didn’t have cable TV and were watching Netflix every night.  My list of 25 titles to see was rapidly diminishing and Grace began complaining about my depressing choices, including “Deep Water,” about one guy’s failed attempt to sail around the world in a homemade boat; “Veronica Guerin,” in which a female newspaper reporter gets murdered in the first three minutes; and “The Battle of Algiers,” about Algeria’s bloody fight for independence in 1957.   When I governed the choices, I tended to ignore chick flicks.   

About two weeks later, I figured out how to connect the roof antenna to the TV set.  That gave us five commercial, educational and religious channels not to watch.   Soon: the quest for television and Internet continues with the visit of Michael, the Comcast Tech.