{"id":235,"date":"2002-02-05T13:29:23","date_gmt":"2002-02-05T18:29:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/burgwinkel.com\/blog\/?p=235"},"modified":"2002-02-05T13:29:23","modified_gmt":"2002-02-05T18:29:23","slug":"did","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/burgwinkel.com\/blog\/?p=235","title":{"rendered":"did"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I actually did a couple of the things that have been on my To Do list for about the last year.&nbsp;  Here&#8217;s the latest:.&nbsp; <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I have a new doctor.&nbsp;  I haven&#8217;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 <a href=\"opWin('http:\/\/burgwinkel.com\/journal\/000113.htm', 'minePopupWin', 'left=20,top=10,width=860,height=640,scrollbars=yes,resizable=yes');\">I fired them<\/a> over two years ago.&nbsp;  They would have me taking lots of nasty things that are bad for my body.&nbsp;  Now don&#8217;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.&nbsp;  It&#8217;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.&nbsp; Whereas the doctors&#8217; cost\/benefit analysis, I came to believe, was based more on the movement of money than on my well being.&nbsp; 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&#8217;s so dutifully shovel into their patients mouths.&nbsp;\n<p>\nMy insurance, which resumed six months ago, requires me to pick a PCP right away.&nbsp;  I want to avoid the status quo and the powers that be as much as possible, so I didn&#8217;t want an MD.&nbsp;  The only variation offered by my insurance is a few DO&#8217;s (Doctors of Osteopathy), so I picked the one closest to my house.&nbsp;  Already I&#8217;m thinking that I should have picked the woman DO, not the man.&nbsp;  We&#8217;ll see&#8230;\n<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li>I have found an apartment to at least look at.&nbsp;  It is more than we (my friend Irene and I) want to pay, but that is true of every apartment we&#8217;ve heard about lately, except for the mythological &#8216;my cousin&#8217;s uncle has a really nice place for rent, real cheap&#8230;&#8217;.&nbsp; We&#8217;re going Wednesday at noon to look at it.&nbsp;  It has a number of things against it, though.&nbsp;  (Here&#8217;s another list!)\n<ul>\n<li>The heat is not included.&nbsp;  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.&nbsp;  The lame excuse used by the rental agent, which does not bode well, was that winter is almost over.&nbsp;  Hmmm.&nbsp;\n<\/li>\n<li>Besides all that, it&#8217;s gas heat.&nbsp;  It&#8217;s not that it&#8217;s gas that I don&#8217;t like, it&#8217;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.&nbsp;\n<\/li>\n<li>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.&nbsp;  Except in the case of my brother; he dated once and married her.&nbsp;  There are always rare exceptions.).&nbsp;\n<\/li>\n<li>It is the building right next to the one I am in now.&nbsp;  I don&#8217;t know whether that&#8217;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.&nbsp;\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>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.&nbsp;  I ordered it with MegaPath after a disaster with Covad.&nbsp;  Covad discarded me like a dirty cum-rag when they encountered an obstacle to installing the DSL I had ordered from them.&nbsp;  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.&nbsp;  They sent me an e-mail saying basically, sorry, we can&#8217;t do it, bye.&nbsp;  I asked for clarification.&nbsp;  They replied, eventually, &#8216;we said we cannot do it, bye.&#8217;.&nbsp;\n<p>\nNow, 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.&nbsp;  So I figured that they weren&#8217;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.&nbsp;  Covad then decided, to their detriment, to end our relationship.&nbsp;  Silly Covad.&nbsp;  <\/p>\n<p>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 <i>other<\/i> DSL provider.&nbsp;  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.&nbsp;  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.&nbsp;  In less than an hour.&nbsp;  From Jeff Rohrich, the VP of Service Delivery and Support.&nbsp;  What counts is not the &#8216;VP&#8217; title, what counts is his willingness to be identified to me, by name and by whatever title he has?&#8217;maintenance engineer&#8217; would have been fine.&nbsp;  But what counts most is that he explained what options there were for getting around my particular obstacle.&nbsp;  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.&nbsp;  In a deliciously ironic twist, MegaPath will be hiring Covad field technicians to do the install.&nbsp;  <\/p>\n<p>This is admittedly an unfair comparison, comparing Covad&#8217;s sales people to MegaPath&#8217;s tech support people.&nbsp;  But I don&#8217;t care.&nbsp;  Hopefully, deities willing, I will have an excellent DSL connection soon, which is a hell of a lot more than Covad offered.&nbsp;  And MegaPath will even move the line once free during the first twelve months, so I can apartment shop angst-free.\n<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I actually did a couple of the things that have been on my To Do list for about the last year.&nbsp; Here&#8217;s the latest:.&nbsp; I have a new doctor.&nbsp; I haven&#8217;t had a PCP since Jan 2000, which may not &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/burgwinkel.com\/blog\/?p=235\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[441,445,29,449,444,443,438,446,442,447,437,448,54,439,440],"class_list":["post-235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-covad","tag-do","tag-dsl","tag-gas-heat","tag-irene","tag-jeff-rohrich","tag-maintenance-engineer","tag-maryland","tag-megapath-net","tag-sdsl","tag-sweat-lodge","tag-telecommunications","tag-usd","tag-vp","tag-vp-of-service-delivery-and-support"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/burgwinkel.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/burgwinkel.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/burgwinkel.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/burgwinkel.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/burgwinkel.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=235"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/burgwinkel.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/burgwinkel.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/burgwinkel.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/burgwinkel.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}