I was roused out of a luxurious steaming-hot bath yesterday morning by a phone call from Jacob, telling me that the phone installer would be at our house in 15 minutes to set everything up. I abandoned my soaking and scurried to get dried off and decently dressed, despite the temptation to play the spoiled-housewife role and stay in bathrobe and wet hair. If I'd been called upon to answer some trifling question about phone service preferences, I could have waved a hand vaguely and said, oh, I really don't know, you'll have to call my husband at work. He's the one who knows all these things. You know how it is. I'm sure you can call him and you menfolk can work everything out. I'll be in the bathtub painting my toenails, and don't track in any dirt while you're sorting this all out, if you don't mind.
But instead I scrambled and got dressed before the 15 minutes were up, and hung around in my cargo pants and tank-top with my toenails totally and typically devoid of gleaming red polish. I tried to imagine what kind of useful things I might need to say: we'll be getting DSL with this, the jack in the study is probably the most important one to have working, the landlord wants to keep the phone box inconspicuous from the front of the house. There was a mix-up with the phone number, is this one I've got here the right one?
No phone installer. I called Jacob back to make sure he'd said 15 minutes; yes, absolutely, I'm sure he'll be there any moment. I drank some tea, sat out on the porch with Bella on my lap, and watched the driveway with my beady eagle eyes. No phone installer. I swept the porch, picked some tomatoes, took the gravel off of the path and put it back in the gravel bed, and watched the driveway some more. No service trucks of any kind. I put a "Please Knock Hard" sign on the front door and started organizing books. The total lack of telecommunications technicians persisted. It persisted while I put my books away on the shelves, decided they weren't properly organized, took them out, and put them all back differently. It persisted while I got distracted by The Color Purple and read it for an hour; it persisted through three phone conversations about Gene and Kristen's barbeque; it persisted through another hour of The Color Purple and thirty minutes of sorting through boxes of paperwork. What I'm trying to say is that there was no glimmer of phone installation all day, which leads one to wonder why the hell someone called to say they'd be over in 15 minutes in the first place.
If there were a contest to see who could take the greatest number of words to bitch about being gotten out of the bathtub for no good reason, I wouldn't win, because winning doesn't use up enough words. I'd take home the grand prize to the great joy and pride of myself and my loved ones, and spend the rest of my days resting on my laurels.
Posted by dianna at September 7, 2004 11:08 AM