Round a' Bouts

I finally took the plunge. After a few months of wavering, I finally jumped on the DSL bandwagon - mostly because Earthlink offered to give it to me for the same price as what I currently pay for dial-up. I figured I didn't have anything to lose. Even better, five days after I signed up for DSL the modem arrived, and I thought I was on my way to streaming audio and skipping from website to website as though I were dancing on clouds. I was footloose and fancy free ... until I hooked up the modem and - wallah - no DSL!

For the past week two weeks, I've been trying to "troubleshoot" what the problem is, which means I've been calling 1-888-Earthlink over and over again. Finally, though, I got them to send out a technician yesterday, and he confirmed that my telephone line hasn't been wired yet for DSL service. He then informed me that our line is serviced by an SBC building two blocks north of us ... "shouldn't be a problem getting that up by tomorrow morning," he assured me. But when the modem still showed no signs of life this morning, I was back on the phone - pushing numbers to direct me through customer service labrynth.

As it stands now, we're just waiting for the technicians in the building just two blocks away to make the connection. Of course, there is no direct number to get a hold of them. Instead, we call another 1-800 number and speak to somebody over in India. Oh, it is driving me insane.

Thankfully, to keep me from breaking, we got the best Christmas gift ever imaginable: MacGyver - the First Season. First off, I had no idea that Henry Winkler (aka 'the Fonz') produced the show. Secondly, I forgot how corny and easy natured 80's shows are. We've watched two shows already, and we've also made some other assessments:

-Criminals and bad guys in the 80's were ridiculously bad shots - often missing from less than twenty feet (and with automatic weapons to boot!)
-Narration by the hero is intended to be cool, but upon closer examination it is often just corny
-Solving intensely difficult problems or overcoming tremendous odds is much easier when you've got video editing, stunt doubles, and only fifty-five minutes of air-time.

Which leads me to one final conclusion: life is simply not television. The fantasy that was MacGyver or Magnum P.I. is a far cry from the reality of day-to-day. In real life, villians aren't shown in profile in the first thirty seconds of the show, and life's problems often don't involve international drug lords, toxic gas leaks, or the threat of nuclear holocaust. Life is more sordid, less absolute and much more confusing. I spent my day fumbling my way through automated voice mail messages, and as far as I could tell, there was no easy way around the madness. Then again, I'm not MacGyver.

Wes