{"id":1228,"date":"2011-05-13T12:18:57","date_gmt":"2011-05-13T18:18:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.keloland.com\/lund\/?p=1228"},"modified":"2023-07-20T21:00:09","modified_gmt":"2023-07-20T21:00:09","slug":"computer-withdrawal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/computer-withdrawal\/","title":{"rendered":"Computer Withdrawal"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Cue music from The Godfather)<\/p>\n

\u00a0Thursday\u2019s congressional hearing on the insane increases of fuel prices, in which the heads of the five major oil companies were summoned to justify their record high\u00a0profits while continuing to receive taxpayer subsidies,\u00a0reminded me of those federal hearings in the Godfather II movie in which a congressional committee was looking into the activities of New York\u2019s five Mafia crime families.<\/p>\n

\"oil<\/p>\n

\u00a0And, just like in the film when they couldn\u2019t make charges against Michael Corleone stick, this effort to call the oil execs on the carpet, was, as Senator Orin Hatch predicted: (with a visual aid) A Dog and Pony Show.<\/p>\n

\"Senate

Senate Finance Committee members yuk it up at Oil Executives hearing.<\/p><\/div>\n

The oil big wigs say the high pump prices aren\u2019t their fault and the Congressmen say the execs are out of touch with an angry American people..blah, blah blah.<\/p>\n

\"oil<\/p>\n

There was a lot of blame passing and name calling..but analysts say a bill aimed at cutting subsidies to big oil has little or no chance of passing. So here we are having to shell out money most of us can\u2019t spare, not only to pay through the nose at the pump but for all commodities that are shipped by trucks or planes or trains or burros (Animal feed costs have gone up too, ya know) and it\u2019s nobody\u2019s fault and\u00a0 nobody can do a dadblame thing about it. I wish whomever is getting filthy rich off of our misery would get a visit from Vito Corleone\u2019s top persuader, Luca Brasi. Oh, wait. He, like Osama bin Laden, sleeps with the fishes.<\/p>\n

On another matter: \u201cMy name is Doug and I\u2019m a computerholic.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Up until Thursday, I had convinced myself that time spent at the computer was not wasted but important toward the betterment of personal knowledge, good clean fun socializing and vital to researching information for these blogs. Then when I went to boot up yesterday I got booted in the gut..no internet.\u00a0 Okay, I thought, this has happened before. Midco must be doing some junk that\u2019s taken me off line. Just wait a few minutes and it\u2019ll come back. But time passed and it DIDN\u2019T return. Now what? Panic began to set in. I felt like the old days when I\u2019d reach for a cigarette and discover I was out and the stores were closed. So, I got on the phone to Midco Cable and, after dancing to the electronic lady\u2019s voice prompts, I pushed the correct button to speak to a real live person. The robo woman put me on hold until the next real live person was available. In the meantime, the piped-in music was not only awful but sounded like someone had set the tuner between two\u00a0radio stations so I\u2019d hear a staticky version of Muskrat Love mixed with a little \u201cDo You Know The Way to San Jose.\u201d Every now and then, that phoney female voice returned to remind me how busy all the real people were, pleaded with me to stay on the line and then suggested \u00a0I consider making\u00a0a couple Midco purchases\u00a0while waiting.\u00a0 I became stressed and hung up.<\/p>\n

I got to thinking about it and wondered if my modem somehow got bumped and unplugged so I went to investigate. I\u2019m sure glad Linda didn\u2019t take a picture of me wallowing under the computer desk trying to sort through the big nest of wires in my vane attempt to find a simple solution. Nothing worked. Back to the phone. More fake voices, more static music, more reminders how important my call was and then\u2026.Voila…Tim came on the line. \u201cYou\u2019re the real person I\u2019ve been waiting for,\u201d I said. \u201cHow can I help,\u201d replied Tim..just as Linda pointed out that our Midco phone line was dead too. After explaining my plight and doing a bit of sweet talking, Tim agreed to move us up on the priority repair list and within a couple hours, the Midco panel truck pulled up out front with a guy named David at the wheel. When he got out of the vehicle..he just kept getting out of the vehicle. David easily stands six foot 8 or 9 and makes ME look like one of the Seven Dwarfs. (Grumpy or Dopey) I quickly deduced that Tim only sends David out on calls that could potentially involve a problem customer because he looked pretty intimidating.\u00a0 Well, it turns out, the big guy was a big Teddy Bear who really knows his stuff. He spent a lot of time dealing with the maze of cables and splitters in our house eventually finding and fixing a\u00a0problem with the line and replacing a faulty modem. He even volunteered to return Saturday to upgrade our cable wires and install a couple digital TV boxes.<\/p>\n

The main thing is I quickly came out of my computer withdrawal to find that I really hadn\u2019t missed all that much and it was actually rather nice catching up on a couple of South Dakota Magazine back issues.<\/p>\n

I have a feeling, though, that\u00a0Linda\u00a0might now sneak in and unplug the computer so I\u2019ll get off my butt and mow the yard.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Cue music from The Godfather) \u00a0Thursday\u2019s congressional hearing on the insane increases of fuel prices, in which the heads of the five major oil companies were summoned to justify their record high\u00a0profits while continuing to receive taxpayer subsidies,\u00a0reminded me of those federal hearings in the Godfather II movie in which a congressional committee was looking…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[60],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1228"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1228"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1228\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11794,"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1228\/revisions\/11794"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}