Red Flagged

Today’s a big day for me. I’m venturing into the world of wireless internet. Oh, that’s right, make fun of me and tell me I’m living in the days of rotary telephones. Sure. I see how you all are. But today is a huge step for me. Rather than sit and wait ten minutes for a page to load and an hour for a picture to attach, I am going to finish work quite early—which means more time to play. The sad part about this story is that I used to work for an internet company who provided DSL. I stuck to the good ol’ dial up internet. Getting bumped off every fifteen minutes was enough to drive me batty. I’m neurotic as it is.

So I sit here, waiting for the ‘cable guy’ to come. My mornings are precious. I rely on my huge cup of coffee and half a bagel with egg whites to start off my day. The company gave me a time frame of 8-12---as they usually do. I get a phone call, and the cable guy says, “Well that may not be my route.” He has to call me back to see if I’m his ‘territory’. Great. This means working with dial up for a little while longer.

I used to go on field visits with the technicians at my old place of work to get the ‘full experience’ of my job. It was a phone/internet/DSL company that I worked for. We would go into houses that were really beautiful—from new constructions to old Victorians that were just stunning. Then you have the people who didn’t live so well. Worst of all, there were people who didn’t understand the concept of ‘cleanliness’. No, I’m not talking about being messy here and there—I’m talking about completely and utterly unsanitary to the point of dry heaving. Cat litter that hadn’t been changed in months, food that’s been laying out for days and funky smells coming from God knows what.

There was one woman who was listed as a ‘red flag’. They refused to go into her home because of the conditions she lived under. We had the right to refuse anybody who lived in unsafe and unsanitary quarters. This woman was a handful. She would complain and call the PUC (Public Utility Commissions) on us all the time. She even resorted to filing a police report about the company claiming they were being discriminative. It wasn’t about race, gender, religion or anything else—it was about our employee’s safety that we were concerned with. It was a health concern.

Anytime I sit here waiting for ‘the cable guy’ whether it be for my satellite TV or today for my high speed internet, I always go into this cleaning frenzy. I’m usually pretty clean, but lately I’ve been slacking. My office is a disaster. Ever since I went on vacation, there are piles and piles of unopened mail on my desk and other things left behind that I was too lazy to get rid of. It looked like the Tasmanian devil whizzed through here at some point. Now that I have a little time to wait for this guy to figure out whether or not “I’m his territory”, I have some more time to clean up. Watch—he’ll probably just set me up from the outside and I did all this for nothing. My luck. Who am I trying to impress anyway? I guess I just fear that one day I’ll be like that little old lady who got red flagged at the phone company.