The phone company took away my old fashioned DSL service and held me hostage until I agreed to "upgrade" to the new and improved service which will allow the phone company to offer the equivalent of cable TV to eager little consumers.
I awoke one morning to find my Internet service gone and it wasn't restored until I made an appointment for installers to come to my house and bolt on the "upgrade." They were nice guys, the outside guy in the white shirt sweating a river as he bolted on the new box. The orange shirt was supposed to install the inside box to make it all happen seamlessly.
Unfortunately there is a problem with the network on my street or on my island somewhere so all AT&T's workers and vans cannot install twelve gigabyte U-Verse service for the moment. Unfortunately they cannot restore my dreary old six gigabyte DSL service either so I am cut off from the world. I will have to lurk at MIckey D's or the library for the next few days, or weeks until the glorious new Internet world can be streamed into my house.
I understand that the phone company has to compete with the cable companies and most people want TV service in their homes (I don't and I don't miss cable at all), but this upgrade will double the cost of Internet service to $55 a month and increase the speed to a level which I do not need. This snafu is emblematic of our high tech world where what we want matters less than what the one percent want and their engineers can deliver. I dislike being reminded I am a serf. The corporate slogan ungrammatically delivered as "Think Possible" reeks of irony in my small world.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad