Freedom

It’s Friday afternoon, and Memorial Day weekend is here, and I have few problems that summer can’t solve. Few problems but not no problems. No problems is too much to ask for in a fallen world, especially a fallen world in which Verizon exists.

I worked from home today, and fortunately, I started quite early, because my FiOS went down at 2:45 PM and Verizon can’t fix it until Sunday. I finished almost a whole day, so I don’t have to take any PTO, but I started early for a reason, that reason being that I have a ton of work to do and I wanted to work a bit longer today so I’d have things under control on Tuesday; and so that I wouldn’t have to work during the holiday weekend.

When it became quite apparent that the WiFi was really and truly down for the count, I forced myself to do the thing that I hate to do almost more than any other task in life. I called Verizon, and the moment the chatbot come on the line to try to helpfully help me route my call to the helpfulest agent, I wished I hadn’t. For “security reasons” (“security” meaning “we want to make dealing with us as miserable as possible”) they insisted that they could not and would not speak to me until they could verify my identity with the owner of the account, that owner being my husband, who was of course at work. As was I, but I couldn’t do my work, because thanks Verizon. After they sent my husband a text message, and he forwarded it to me and I read them the number that established my identity, I asked the super helpful agent to add my number to the account so that we wouldn’t have to go through this process again. And he said “Of course—I’ll be happy to. I’ll just replace his number with yours.”

And I said “No, please don’t replace his number. Just add mine.”

I will spare you the rest of this conversation. But the upshot is that Verizon’s customer management system has room for only one phone number. Just one. It seems not to have occurred to this giant tech company that it might be possible to add a form field that would allow a service agent to store an additional phone number; nor that many of the households that their company serves might include more than one person. They’re sending a technician out on Sunday.

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Saturday: I’m not good at being free. I know no better way to explain this, but I’ll try. No matter what I am doing, I always feel that I should be doing something else. No matter how I might like to sleep a little later or relax on the couch or take an afternoon off to just be a person, I can’t seem to do it. This is partly circumstance-related, because I’m a person with a demanding job and a family and responsibilities. But it’s much more a function of my nature. I’m wound pretty tightly. I know this about myself.

Every so often, though, the door opens a bit, and I let myself walk outside it and I look at my computer and walk right past it, and I walk right through the kitchen and don’t stop to prep dinner or wash a dish, and I walk right through the laundry room, ignoring the pile of folded laundry that needs to be put away, and then I walk right out the door to freedom. It’s Saturday, and it’s Memorial Day weekend, and I just finished swimming my first outdoor laps of 2019. The water was freezing, and it wasn’t fine once you got used to it, and an hour later, I’m still a little numb around the toes. It’s pretty glorious.

*****

So it’s Sunday, the day that Verizon is supposed to come, and of course they’re going to stretch their two-hour arrival window to its limit because they wouldn’t be Verizon if they didn’t suck. They’re supposed to arrive between 12 and 2, and it’s 12:59 now, and I’m guessing that my doorbell will ring at 1:57. Then I’ll wait around while the extremely polite technician analyzes the problem. And then he will either very politely explain why he can’t fix it today under any circumstances; or, he will tell me that he CAN fix it but the problem is our fault and not theirs and fixing it will cost us even more money than the ridiculous sum that we already hand over every month.

Truthfully, I don’t even care that much. Other than not being able to work at home until the FiOS is restored (well, that is kind of a pain), I don’t miss it. My son and I played Scrabble yesterday. Last night, we watched an old Star Wars movie on DVD. I can write without distractions. No one can play Fortnite. NO ONE CAN PLAY FORTNITE! And hockey season, at least as far as I care about it, is over. So I don’t need FiOS. I just want to get out of the house.

*****

It’s Monday now, Memorial Day. Verizon finally showed up at 2:05 and they were finished by 2:30 and I was out the door at 2:45. And it was a lovely rest of the day of sorting t-shirts for our annual 5K and swimming laps and reading books and celebrating a six-year-old’s birthday and going to sleep early and waking up even earlier. It’s 3 PM, and it’s time to go swimming again. Happy Memorial Day, and happy summer.