i don’t miss the phone company (a flashback)

so, randy and i get to sa yesterday AHEAD of schedule, around 11:00 am or so…only to find out the line, that swb says they can’t bring to our outlet from the great outdoors, is dead anyway. ain’t that craptacular? we say, “to hell with them…” and decide to start trouble-shooting the whole “break on in through the other side” issue; i.e. how to get a phone line in the store, NOT how to plagiarize and slightly bastardize doors’ song titles; i do that quite well myself, thank you.

we find one hole that comes in through the cinder block walls, and after i crawl up into the ceiling and wade through the two feet of fiberglass insulation and asbestos that resides above each of the ceiling tiles, i’m face to face with a hole that’s just a wee-bit too small for what’s there already AND our wire.

no problem. we ghetto drill the cinder block mortar. this is accomplished not with a hammer and chisel, but rather with a flat-head screw drive and the wrist strength of a boy who’s been far too lonely for far too long…but never mind that now. the long and the short of it (pardon the pun) is the wire was now IN the building. i start reeling out all we need indoors while randy (who’s on the roof of the strip mall) pulls the other way for the drop to the outside box.

now it’s my turn…up the ladder…fiberglass bits in my hair…asbestos up my nose. pass the wire. pass the wire. (NOT meant in the prison-slang sense of the phrase…i’m not THAT fucking lonely..again, pardon the pun). back down the ladder. over and over again until the line is to where it can be dropped. at this point, to get me fresh air, we go outside and find dial tone on our line (amazing what “tear-them-a-new-one” calls can do to a phone company employee, huh?). we bolt down the line and now have dial tone to where we dropped into the back of the store; two quick wire splices later and it’s at the front of the store. we wire up the jack and all is good, with clean tone coming out of the jack. only problem is, our phone cord is too short. not an issue. i can make a phone cord from scratch pretty easily, and proceed to do so; five minutes later we’re hooking it up…

and have no dial tone.

they killed our line THAT quickly, and for no apparent reason. now, was it COINCIDENCE that during this five minutes our sbc “rep” called us to say she was still working on reaching a tech to see when he could be scheduled to come out and re-asses the installation “issue” only to be told that me and randy were DONE? i don’t mean to drop the word “conspiracy” onto my page twice in one week, but come on…..let’s just call it non-professional jealousy. and it stayed dead as hell till this morning; but after numerous (read: 11) calls to our “rep” where the phrase “i CAN find out where you live” may or may not have been used, depending on who’s lawyer you’re talking to at the time, all was working fine,so now i don’t have to back to sa…till NEXT week.

after all the asbestos and fiberglass and ladder scaling we arrive back at the office around 4:55 or so, meaning i had time to check email, check for whore comments (yes, i DO read them if you bother to post one) and was off work.

for an hour or so.

just enough time to go to the gym, then it was BACK on the clock for the sasha & digweed show, where they spun their little dance grooves until the early am, and i had to WORK till the early am…nothing like a fourteen hour day to make you sleep REALLY soundly for the four hours you get to crash before you have to get up and go back to work. and to think; tomorrow i get to sit under the tattoo machine for a few hours to FINALLY finish the cross on my stomach once and for all, then uncomfortably sit through a baseball game and sweat on my fresh ink; but then i get a real, two days, no work, weekend.

i think i will have to set something on fire, and cook meat on it.