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RANT 'O THE WEEK: by WritersCollege.com Director Steve Morrill
Apologies, first off, to anyone trying to contact me for the past four-five days. Lost modem and telephone lines early Thursday and only got those up and running again late Monday morning. I'm catching up now but am mightily annoyed with Brighthouse Network. They are always advertising that we should "Live in a BrightHouse." All too often, I find myself living in a dark house.
It was not always thus. Many years ago, I had dial-up at 56kb, the fastest then available, coming into the office on a separate phone line. So, two phone lines from Verizon, the telephone company. I had heard of this new cable thing for modems but it was not yet in my area. Frankly, I had not given it much thought. The phone modem worked as well as any of them ever did. I even had a mini-program installed that monitored the through-put on the modem, sort of a speedometer, and it always stayed rock-solid at about 56kb.
Until the day a Verizon employee installed a new phone line into a home across the street. I watched him working; my office windows face the street. When he was done he started to drive off, then looked at my house, then stopped his truck, got out, and went to the side of my house, the side with the telephone box on it. I could no longer see him but suddenly my little speedometer program dropped form 56kb to 33.6kb. The guy got into his truck and zoomed off, having performed a sort of drive-by degradation of my service.
I called Verizon and complained. It did not go well:
"We don't have to give you 56kb. We're only required by law to give you 33.6kb because that's needed for fax machines. If you want to have a computer modem, that's not our problem."
"But it was running fine at 56kb. Your guy somehow screwed it up. Can't you fix that?"
"We could. But we don't have to. So, no, we won't."
Ah, you can always tell when you're dealing with a utility company with no competition. I may as well have been David Copperfield asking for more porridge.
I called Brighthouse. They added me to a list of desperate would-be customers and, to their credit, got a cable run to my house within three months. I think I was their first customer in my neighborhood. I then switched both phone and modem to them (plus the TV), called Verizon, and told them to stick their attitude where the moon don't shine.
Things went along tickety-boo for years. But for the last two years I have had endless intermittent problems. The system goes out. Some helpless person at the other end of my cell phone call (I have Brighthouse on speed-dial on my cell phone—that is so wrong) tells me to restart my computer and/or modem and/or TV and/or TV cable box. None of that stuff ever works, of course, I think they just want to annoy us so we won't call so often. Then they send a technician who replaces the modem and fiddles with the wires inside, outside, and up the pole across the street. Things start working and do so for a day or two. The next technician blames the problems on the ineptness of the first guy. The third technician blames the second guy. This does not instill confidence in the customer. One week last November I had repair people every day of the week.
So, this week? Pray for me. It's working now but for how long is anyone's guess. Meantime I am trying to contact Verizon to see if they can supply me with FIOS in place of Brighthouse.
SCHOOL
NEWS: Nothing special happening this week.
FEATURED
COURSES: (Also see our homepage for daily featured courses)
This highly motivational and inspirational course is designed for writers of all levels and all genres. You will be encouraged to work through any blocks that are holding you back or slowing down your writing.
Good writing reveals rather than explains. Learn to get out of the way and let readers experience the episodes, events and people you're writing about.
Are you an isolated writer because of location, physical disabilities, young children or another reason? This class teaches how to turn this to your advantage.
Learn to to find information, locate and interview experts, learn how to apply the rules of rigorous scholarship to your findings, and learn how to stay out of legal trouble while doing all this.
MediaBistro is a good place for news of the magazine world.
The Writer Beware is a good place to keep up on the worst of the scammers out there.
WHO's
DOING WHAT: Please send us some News We Can Use about your writing efforts.
Marvin Lurie writes: My poem, The Birthright According to Esau, was printed in the 2008 issue of Verseweavers, the anthology of award winning poems published by the Oregon State Poetry Association. It can also be found on the winningwriters.com site.
Lurie also comments on my taxes essay of last week: Just to add support to your attitude towards taxes, my uncle, son of an uneducated immigrant, who became a successful, prominent lawyer by going to night school while holding a full time job, used to say, "I love paying taxes." To him it was both a measure of his success and his contribution to support the freedom and opportunity he enjoyed in this country. Many people don't understand that attitude because they have no experience with the alternatives.
Patrika Vaughn, your Author's Advocate, is once again doing a series of 1-day seminars for the Sarasota Board of Education. Current topics are: Creating Characters Fine Tune Your Writing * Selling What You Write** Write Your Life Story For those of you interested, she also teaches these through Writer's College. See our catalog. (* Problems) (** Stalking the Markets).
Stephen Morrill has to visit and map all the Orlando, Florida tourist attractions for a British company that makes tourist maps. He hasn't been to Disney World in 20 years and isn't sure his feet are up to it. He'll report back someday.
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