Local calls

Any talk about sustainability often turns to a discussion of acting locally. It seems odd that as a person who finds herself beating the local drum, and that rather loudly at times, that I don’t always seem to hear it myself. Consider if you will, the tale of the last week, spent not only icing and elevating an injured torn hamstring, but also bouncing from one distant DSL customer service location in a seemingly futile effort to stay connected.

A month ago, it seemed like a good idea to take care of all those things we had put off for too long before removing ourselves to the Emerald Isle, things like having teeth cleaned, selling off vehicles, and moving our broadband to newer technology (one of the disadvantages of early adoption means that our old framed relay DSL modem was getting long in the tooth, not to mention expensive). I drew the short straw, which meant that making calls to the phone behemoth (the DSL connection) and our local ISP (the email provider) fell to me. A quick, local, call to the kind soul in Bellevue—the same one who has answered that line since at least 1999—revealed that I could keep my current email address for a song, and they could make the change in a couple of hours max, no problems.

Ah, but such is not the case for the national monster: for nearly a week, we (for somewhere in there, they broke me, and Darling Husband had to take over while I retired to my bed with an ice pack for my leg, and Bailey’s on ice for the rest of me), logged nearly six hours of navigating voice mail menus, traveling the globe (to call centers in Mexico, The Philippines, India and Long Beach), and listening to the same annoying jazz music loop on hold. Darling Husband, The Mistress of Indulgence and our Housesitter Extraordinaire have rolled under the desk (no need to dust there any time soon), plugging and unplugging devices in a seemingly random fashion, all to no avail.

And so it was, that today, on the drive to our last doctor’s appointment while we still have insurance, Darling Husband and I figuratively slapped our communal foreheads and said, “why, oh why, didn’t we just call that groovy local guy for DSL, and just dump the landline (and Verizon, to name the culprit) altogether?” Perhaps, once we have recovered from the double trauma (I understand that Eirecom can be equally obtuse), we will come home and do just that—live where we are.