I actually did a couple of the things that have been on my To Do list for about the last year. Here's the latest:
- I have a new doctor. I haven't had a PCP since Jan 2000, which may not sound like much to most of the world, but me and the medical profession were quite enmeshed when I fired them over two years ago. They would have me taking lots of nasty things that are bad for my body. Now don't get me wrong, I am no prude; there are a number of nasty things, bad for my body, that I inflict on it nonetheless. It's just that the cost/benefit analysis benefitted mainly me, in the case of the bad things that I choose, i.e., coffee, vodka martinis, cheap sex with unnamed participants, etc. Whereas the doctors' cost/benefit analysis, I came to believe, was based more on the movement of money than on my well being. I had been on over six hundred dollars worth of medication per month, happily paid by my insurance to the monstrosities who produce this shit, which the doc's so dutifully shovel into their patients mouths.
My insurance, which resumed six months ago, requires me to pick a PCP right away. I want to avoid the status quo and the powers that be as much as possible, so I didn't want an MD. The only variation offered by my insurance is a few DO's (Doctors of Osteopathy), so I picked the one closest to my house. Already I'm thinking that I should have picked the woman DO, not the man. We'll see...
- I have found an apartment to at least look at. It is more than we (my friend Irene and I) want to pay, but that is true of every apartment we've heard about lately, except for the mythological 'my cousin's uncle has a really nice place for rent, real cheap...' We're going Wednesday at noon to look at it. It has a number of things against it, though. (Here's another list!)
- The heat is not included. This would not matter if the rent were lower, but at $525/month for each of us, I do not want to be looking at any more bills. The lame excuse used by the rental agent, which does not bode well, was that winter is almost over. Hmmm.
- Besides all that, it's gas heat. It's not that it's gas that I don't like, it's the big, clunky, invariably ugly heater that sits somewhere central in the apartment, making the den a sweat lodge while leaving the outlying rooms to freeze.
- And it is the first one we have looked at in several months (statistics prove that the selected item from a group of items is almost always the third, almost never the first. Except in the case of my brother; he dated once and married her. There are always rare exceptions.)
- It is the building right next to the one I am in now. I don't know whether that's a good or a bad thing, but a move that easy would never be allowed to happen by the evil deities who rule my world.
- And last but indeed, best; I have ordered SDSL to be installed whenever the fates decide—this is the scheduling method chosen by congress when it deregulated telecommunications in 1996. I ordered it with MegaPath after a disaster with Covad. Covad discarded me like a dirty cum-rag when they encountered an obstacle to installing the DSL I had ordered from them. True, there have been many times I have eagerly assumed the role of a cum-rag, but this time it was not my preferred choice. They sent me an e-mail saying basically, sorry, we can't do it, bye. I asked for clarification. They replied, eventually, 'we said we cannot do it, bye.'
Now, this might have been a disaster for a paranoid person, and I am a paranoid person, but I also know more about DSL than most people. So I figured that they weren't just blacklisting me because they found out I suck dick, I concluded (rightly, I might add) that they encountered a silly stupid little problem with my particular phone line, which is not uncommon in the DSL provisioning process. Covad then decided, to their detriment, to end our relationship. Silly Covad.
Since Covad had not answered my question about what the obstacle was, I decided to ask, not a DSL sales person, but a tech support person at some other DSL provider. The tech support people are not being told what to say and what not to say; and they usually know what they are saying when they say it, unlike the sales people. So, at 12:30 AM Wednesday morning, I e-mailed tech support at MegaPath.net, explaining the issue in detail, and I actually got an intelligent response. In less than an hour. From Jeff Rohrich, the VP of Service Delivery and Support. What counts is not the 'VP' title, what counts is his willingness to be identified to me, by name and by whatever title he has—'maintenance engineer' would have been fine. But what counts most is that he explained what options there were for getting around my particular obstacle. The option I chose—from Megapath—is a separate, dedicated SDSL line, which Covad could have provided, and it will cost roughly three times more than the line Covad could not install, but I will be paying MegaPath, not Covad. In a deliciously ironic twist, MegaPath will be hiring Covad field technicians to do the install.
This is admittedly an unfair comparison, comparing Covad's sales people to MegaPath's tech support people. But I don't care. Hopefully, deities willing, I will have an excellent DSL connection soon, which is a hell of a lot more than Covad offered. And MegaPath will even move the line once free during the first twelve months, so I can apartment shop angst-free.
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