Fuk-Ola-Dola

Patti with surprise appearance by Severus Snape. (Peter Buck)

When I started this post almost two hours ago, it was going to be about seeing Patti Smith talk about her new memoir this week. But we’ve had a minor clusterfuk in the meanwhile so I’m going to write about that instead.

Here’s Hannah’s review of Patti in Seattle. The first time I met Hannah was at a soccer game. The second time I met Hannah was at a Patti Smith show. If the third time we met it was at a Star Wars convention, we would have had to get married. But she’s not a Star Wars fanatic. But she loves to read and is a fiction librarian which is even better. But we already married other people.

Here’s Bob’s review of Patti in Portland.

Onto today’s surprise adventure.

We have this giant hedge between our house and the house next door. Today we had someone come over to prune our trees and whack back the hedge.

A couple of hours ago he knocked on the door to let me know that he’d accidentally cut the phone line to the house next door. Okay! Crap!

I got on the horn and sat through the phone tree from hell, did a song and dance to get the repair department. “No not my phone, the phone next door,” and so forth like this. They told me there was no record of them having a landline.

Yay! They won’t be inconvenienced.

The phone company made an appointment to come fix it anyway and I put a note on the neighbor’s door letting them know what was happening.

Could it possibly be that easy?

No. Neighbor comes over and thanks me for the note but informs me she has no cable and no internet. And she’s not happy. And who can blame her? Who wants to come home from work and find you have no cable because of your stupid neighbors?

So now I have to get on the horn with Comcast and go through another phone tree. [Hint: when the phonebot asks you to explain the problem yell at it. It’ll transfer you to a person.] More back and forth and when can they come? Monday. Yikes! Please don’t make me go to angry neighbor’s house and tell her she has to wait until Monday. More back and forth. The best they can do is tomorrow.

Then back to the phone company’s phone tree to cancel that service call.

Then over to neighbor’s with more apologies and explanation.

Then pour a glass of wine.

Let’s just hope the repair goes as planned. The guy said “there is no way on earth someone won’t be there to repair it tomorrow.”