Believe you me, I had one of the shittiest Saturdays a lower middle class nobody like me could ever have. This goes way beyond the usual laments of why my mom didn’t hook up with Bill Gates or why a tall, intelligent and smart man considered good looking by all strata of society possessing half of Rocco’s bread and butter wouldn’t deign to look at me at all. This shit is real.
Went to work all sick and woozy and dainty from this miserable flu I’ve had the past couple days… oh yes I know that I am the least likely dainty of all dainty people but the feeling of light-headedness is so whoosh and makes me feel like I’m floating and not as heavy or rough as I normally am and makes me feel like Kate Moss sans coke. See, it’s giving me illusions already.
Didn’t make me feel better when Abang N and I realised that this month’s stars are fubar for me. Chinese metaphysics can be cruel like that.
When I got home, I switched my pc on and of course I couldn’t get connected to the Internet, the DSL light on my modem kept blinking, nevermind that everything was fine and dandy before I went to work.
So I called Streamyx to check if there was any service interruption in my area. Some nice chick took my call, went through the standard troubleshooting ritual with me and asked if I would like to make a report to which I said I would call back later if I still couldn’t get connected. At this point I also found out that the Streamyx helpline is now 24 hours, yay!
Then I drove out to my local pc shop to collect a couple of modems I’d sent for service. I also bought a network card and a network cable, just in case.
Came back, replaced my network card and cable with the new ones, tried using my ‘new’ modems, still nothing worked.
Called Streamyx again, they confirmed that my account was fine and that there was no service interruption in my area, so I made a report. I asked them if they had an alternative number to Telekom’s 100, they didn’t.
You see, Telekom has this standard number - 100 for fault reporting and it’s the only number you get from their website, bill statement etc which you can only call from a house phone or a public phone. Which kind of defies logic and puts you in a catch-22 situation - there’s something wrong with your phone line, you want to call up Telekom to make a report but you can’t because there’s only the 100 number and you can’t call out from your house phone because it’s faulty… Is it weird or have I been missing out on something for all the years I am subscribed to Telekom’s fixed line?
Anyway my house phone has been out-of-order for a bit and I couldn’t be bothered to go get a new set so of course, I couldn’t call the 100 number. At this point I decided to call MAXIS because- hey I am using their service and if I can’t call 100 directly from their line there’d better be something else I could do, save for jumping into a lake.
I called MAXIS’s 123 - I realised that they killed the option to ’speak to someone, anyone for any freakish out-of-the-world incidents that you feel is necessary for MAXIS to know out of the millions of people in the world’. So I picked the most remotely connected option that is fault reporting because it is someone’s fault that I can’t call 100 directly from my MAXIS mobile. Some female half-heartedly listened as I tried to explain what I wanted, then impatiently insisted that I could call 100 direct from my MAXIS mobile line, which I disputed and said I tried it before, I could call 103 but not 100, she said that I could call 100 and 103 and 103 works, ffs I KNOW that 103 works but that’s not the reason I called, no no you CAN call 100 direct bla bla yadda yadda bye.
I called 103 and this really nice female told me that I can’t call 100 from my mobile but she has an alternative number that I could call. So I did, and this really nice male checked my Telekom fixed line status and told me that everything is fine, there’s no problems with it whatsoever. You know the world is changing when the people at Telekom treat you much better than at MAXIS.
Next thing I wanted to know was if it’s normal for the DSL line to be blinking on my modem even after I unplugged the phone line. KY didn’t know for sure, so I called up my local pc shop - they’d sold me all my modems and solved more than half my pc problems so they should know at least something, or that was what I thought. Some chick didn’t understand what I was talking about, and passed the phone to a guy I know and the conversation went something like this:
me: I just want to know if it is normal for the DSL light on my Aztech modem to be blinking even after I took out the phone line.
pc shop guy: You have to check with Streamyx first if there’s any problem with your connection and if there’s no problem you can bring the modem for us to check.
me: Yah I know but there’s no problem, I just want to know if it is normal for the DSL light on my Aztech modem to be blinking even after I disconnected the phone line.
pc shop guy: Yalar you have to check with Streamyx first if there’s any problem with your connection and if there’s no problem you can bring the modem for us to check.
me: Yes yes I know I have to check with Streamyx but do you know if it’s normal for an Aztech modem or any modem’s DSL light to be continuously blinking even after the phone line is not connected?
pc shop guy: That’s what I said, you have to check with Streamyx first to see if there’s any problem with your connection, then if there’s no problem you bring the modem for us to check la.
I was feeling damn sick and woozy and didn’t think I could drive especially with my car’s air conditioning unit’s history fucked beyond imagination, so I called and asked KY if he could drive me the shop which normally closes at 7 p.m. He picked me and my three Aztech modems + 2 adapters + one network cable up, we reached the shop at 6.03 p.m. to find it closed. Some dude who for some reason was standing downstairs told us that the shop closes at 7 p.m. on weekdays and at 6 p.m. on Saturdays. Apparently they had all just left like a minute ago.
Went to KY’s crib, was supposed to join them for dinner but was so exhausted and sickly that I slept on his bed for 3 hours. KY then sent me home and I’d left my purse in his car which caused me quite a bit of distress the next day before I called him to check.
And seeing that I could get on-line now (not really stable though), it must be a connection problem and has nothing to do with my modem.
Sunday was quite alright seeing that I pretty much slept it through.
Saturday just totally sucked.
Of course there would be people who had shittier Saturdays like having a tree fell on their cars causing their pure breed such severe emotional distress that it ran out and proceed to doggy fuck the first stray mutt it sees, or during a weekend contemplation realise that you are doomed for bad sex and spinsterhood for the rest of your life, or finding out that you have an incurable affliction that strikes 1 out of 1000000 people… whatever, get your own blog.