Celebrity Deaths

…and Saddam makes three. If we really wanted to punish the motherfucker, we would have consigned him to an eternity of moving a lifetime of unnecessary belongings from one shabby domicile with substandard amenities to another. A quick hanging – snap, and it’s over – was way too good for that guy.

Meanwhile, our move just continues to give.

Utilities Day sure brought a smile to my face. I expected to not get any work done; how spectacular a fashion in which I would not achieve any of my goals, that was unexpected.

All I wanted was to have our internet hooked up (so I can do my damn job) and the satellite TV enabled. In a perfect world, the internet would’ve been up in 20 minutes and the TV in a couple hours at most.

This is so not a perfect world.

The internet guy, a taciturn young man with a long goatee and a snotty attitude (we’ll call him Arno) showed up bang on time, bless his heart, while I was on the phone directing the hapless, hours-late-already satellite guy to our new pad. I introduced myself to Arno as the guy who had talked to him on the phone many times that he always seemed to be in a big hurry to get rid of. He mumbled, “Mmm. I’m like that with everyone.”

I totally believe him.

I turned him loose on the wireless gizmo while I walked to the end of our new driveway, phone in hand, and waved the satellite guy to our front door.

Well, Arno fumbled and futzed in irritable silence with our internet situation while the satellite guy (hereafter known as Grant) backed his crumpled, duct-taped pickup truck into the driveway. “I’m a private contractor” he offered.

Again, it was easy to believe he was not a member of DTV’s front-line A-Team.

Thank god our favorite babysitter was on duty, and I did not want to make a bigger asshole out of myself in front of her than I already have, or I would’ve taken both of these guys’ heads off by day’s end.

Arno came and went pretty quickly – either our router was broken or AT&T dropped the ball on their end – whatever, Arno had to run back to Dickweed Home Base to get another router to troubleshoot the problem. Like the movers who had showed up the day before without a single tool, even a screwdriver, Arno had arrived without any contingencies in place for a less than effortless installation. This enabled me to concentrate more exclusively on the comedy of errors that was Grant the satellite guy.

Turns out he was not only unfamiliar with our kind of installation situation – a fact he reiterated repeatedly over the next six hours – he also grew increasingly agitated as the hours slipped by and his myspace date that night approached. I told him the DTV phone lady promised he’d hook up our satellite and network it in with our DVD players and VCRs as part of the deal. This made Grant laugh. Did he remember to mention he’s an independent contractor? Yes, I assured him, he’d mentioned it a couple times already.

So while he was crawling around the attic doing god-knows-what, knocking huge clumps of asbestos-laced crud on the carpet right outside The Man Cab’s room, Arno returned, new router in hand. In no time at all, he had muttered that the problem was with AT&T and he would have to put in a trouble ticket with them to get the issue resolved. With one final dull, contemptuous glare he was gone – and we still didn’t have any internet.

I even tried to dial-up from my office, which is when I learned that of all the dozen or so phone jacks in the house, the only one that actually works is the one in the kitchen. So, no phone in the office for me till we pay the phone company an arm and a leg to come out and sort out the situation. Grant told me the attic was a tangle of phone lines, but then again, this was Grant. They could have just been residual streamers from his last LSD trip… or his current one. I’m not sure.

Anyhow, to make a long story short [TOO LATE!] Grant stayed six hours setting up one dish and two receivers, stunk up the house with cigarette smoke then extorted $50 from us before he would leave. By then, fifty clams seemed like a small price to pay to have our privacy back. And he was still unable to figure out how to hook up our VCRs into the data stream, so that task will fall to me, assuming I ever get this weekend’s work started, let alone finished.

On the plus side, The Missus kicked some serious ass all day, cleaning the old apartment, grocery shopping, buying me flowers the babysitter and I both agreed I didn’t deserve then going to the Laundromat and doing laundry till ten o’clock at night.

So now it’s Saturday morning. Our internet connection is up but turns itself off randomly as it sees fit, we have digital TV but no access to our [my] thousands of hours of videotapes, and one long weekend of setting up house for The Missus, and the production of five community newspapers and two related websites for me ahead of us.

But we’re in, we’re up and tenuously running; and more importantly, with the death of Saddam Hussein, maybe, just maybe, Dumbleyou has finally resolved his Daddy Issues and we can start bringing our kids home from His Excellency’s Excellent Adventure in the Middle East.