"yum, yum, eat 'em up."

I first encountered the folksy maxim in the bathroom of my friend’s house.  He was my first friend, meeting in maybe second grade (maybe first), at the age when friendships grew largely from geographic coincidence (my first friend was actually probably next-door neighbor Katie, though our increasingly divergent maturities and genders, and her eventual and premature death by cancer, makes me consider Matt my first friend, though the writing of this paragraph makes me feel bad about it).

"wanna come over and play?"

Matt lived about two blocks away in  a double-headed Allen-wrench direction.  His family’s house was old, which I took to mean haunted (my family’s had been constructed on the border of virgin wetland at the behest of my parents, part of the great Mounds View land grab of the mid- ’70s).

everything must go

The antiquity of his home was reinforced by his parents’ own advanced age.  My youth prevented me from properly gauging the age of others, but his dad had graying hair and his mom, as the spouse of a gray-hair, took on a perceived elder status of her own (jazzercise classes, though, implied a youthful vigor).

lookin' good

The house was also filled with peculiar wonders of a time and sensibility foreign from my own.  Playing cards bearing black-and-white photos of naked women hid in the mahogany desk of a largely unused sitting room bedecked with fabrics and furniture I associated with a generation beyond my own parents.  A rusted cylinder push mower powered by nothing more than engineering ingenuity and muscle strain (which strangely made it more fun than the trembling gas-powered version at my own home) sat in the cobwebbed garage, the shelves of which were pancaked with dust.  And an embossed plaque in the bathroom declaring the aforementioned phrase while carved, faced mushrooms danced along the plaque’s lower border.

this way to the egress

It’s been a long time since I considered the words of those cavorting mycelium (in the interim I saw my first porno in Matt’s living room [and couldn't stop laughing, much to the irritation of most of the other keen and enraptured boys gathered before the television {my retarded pubescence took faces distorted by pleasure and nonsensical, guttural, ecstatic cries to be closer to a The Three Stooges short than the gateway to primal stirrings}]; I got drunk for one of the first times at Matt’s [and being one of my first drinking experiences, I exaggerated my drunkenness in that ridiculous and obnoxious way endemic to high schoolers {here realized in a disproportionate enjoyment of The Kentucky Fried Movie}, again, to the irritation of others, though Matt quietly dismissed the offended parties' inquiries as to 'what was wrong with him?']; despite drifting apart during the later years of primary and middle school and reconnecting briefly over a shared interest in alcohol [particularly Hot 100] late in high school, Matt and I eventually succumbed to the fatal drift that visits so many childhood friendships [and is superficially breached now via Facebook and its ability to alert you to people's birthdays]) but a couple recent events brought the phrase back to me:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Sadly this deployment of the phrase was a little clunky and exacerbates the folksiness of the wisdom.  Still, Tommy Chong; cool guy.  And, Mike Huckabee, why the shit do you have a TV show?

busy signal

The words also resonated with me during recent dealings with Verizon during a bout of Internet disconnectivity.  Despite a day’s worth of torrential rain and a lightning strike to the fire escape a floor above (resulting in an exploded flowerpot), the Verizon representative to whom I reported the trouble insisted there had been no other reports of Internet outages in my neighborhood and there weather was not likely a factor.  A repairman was to be dispatched the next day, in the bay window of 8am to 6pm.  By 5:30, no one had showed and I called Verizon.  The guy insisted that there had been trouble at one of the company’s hubs and they had to deal with that first and that’s what the computer had told him and that’s all he could tell me.

"sir, the computer is telling me to shoot you."

Then, just after 6, my phone rang.  It was a different Verizon guy.  He was letting me know that they needed to send someone out tomorrow to fix my problem, would a window of 1-5pm work for me?  I pointed out that I had waited 10 hours already (well, Devo had, but we’re engaged and I’m already down with the royal me), that they already said they were sending someone out today.  The guy explained that, gee, it seems like they misrouted the call (whatever that means) and he sure is sorry, but would 1-5pm work.  I need it as soon as possible, I explained, which he took as a yes.  Apparently 1-5pm was the earliest they could get out because they had to get to all the other people they hadn’t managed to get to from yesterday still, which seems to imply there was a widespread problem with the system.  Someone’s not being absolutely forthright with me, and I can’t get anyone on the line to give me a straight answer.  The guy did come out the next day, about half an hour before that day’s window closed.  Apparently I just needed a new modem.  And a mushroom farmer.

what can you tell me about FiOS?

so... close...

Thanks to a mildly helpful Sprint customer service operator, I was able to connect my phone to my computer via a USB cable, which allowed me to easily pull the *photos* off my phone, yet the videos were inaccessible. After placing me on several holds and insisting that, well, this really *should* work, the operator finally admitted defeat and transferred me to technical support. Whom had I been speaking to before? Apparently someone with the best of intentions, but perhaps no specific training in what may be called “the technical field.”

"I'm going to put you a quick hold. Okay?

Well, fine, onto the experts (“experts”). I explained the situation to my new phone friend, went over the steps I had already tried with the previous Sprint representative, and almost immediately the tech supporter admitted defeat and said I would be transferred to “advanced tech support.”

tomorrow, today.

I have to admit, I had high hopes for this advanced technical support. I pictured Tom Cruise in Minority Report (“There is… no question.”)

And the guy on the phone had the appropriate swagger of someone with one foot in the future. There was a backdoor way of getting the video off my phone, he casually informed me. Would I like to know it? Yes. Yes, I would. Well, he told me how to get tothe picturemail page on the Sprint website (which I had already been to), and I did see the video, and a button that said “save to my computer.” So it seemed my problems were over and I thanked the guy and hung up.

fool's gold

Alas, when I actually tried to save the video to my computer, the site was unresponsive as the video just constantly said “processing…” and, you know, never finished processing, which I suppose is what the “…” meant. So I’m back on the phone with Sprint, trying to get some customer service and technical support, giving my number and name and pin number and explaining the situation over and over and over, going through the same channels, handed from one person to another, each one admitting defeat and passing the buck, until I’m on hold for “advanced” technical support and then the line clicks dead and an automated voice urges me to hang up and try my number again. Getting a little irritated now. I wait for whomever put me on hold to call back, since they must have number, as I have given it out over and over and over again thus far. But no call. So back on the phone and dialing Sprint. Back through the same prompts. Back through the same hoops. I get to I reach advanced technical support. We run through the same options again, a dance whose choreography I can recite by heart, including the lack of success which greets every suggestion. Finally the advanced technical support guy confesses, well, he’s googled everything he can think of to help me, but he’s just not finding anything. I call for professional help and I get a guy googling shit. Hell, I could do advanced tech support! You could do it. Everyone is doing it. You and I have the exact same tools at our disposal as Sprint advanced technical support. Google is the great equalizer. Anyway, the guy says he’s going to put me on hold and try to find a colleague who is more knowledgeable about Macs (I am so high maintenance!). But it’s a hold I’d never awaken from.

corporately sponsored euthenasia

The line goes dead again and still I have no answers. And Sprint is not utilizing my call back number. So I slowly climb the Jacob’s ladder of Sprint customer service operators again until an operator tells me she’s transferring me to advanced technical support and the line goes dead. Again. My phone company, specifically the tech support people within my phone company, lack the technical know-how (no how?) to successfully transfer a phone call.

"Right this way, sir."

The whole thing has gotten a bit too Sisyphean, so I gave up for the day. And yet I still needed to figure out how to get the goddam videos off my phone and onto my computer. So the next day, I set my jaw and started the process again. I tersely though not angrily explained the situation and how I needed advanced tech support from someone familiar with Macs and mention how I have repeatedly gotten disconnected. The operator and I reach a consensus that that shouldn’t be happening and that the operators I have been talking to should have, at the very least, called me back.

"Hey, I'm on your side."

She does manage to get me through to an advanced technical support guy, but she doesn’t believe that there are any specific Mac-savvy folks to be found. The advanced technical support guy gets on the line in a hillbilly drawl and we take up the timeless dance once more. Try this, try that, I’ve tried it, how about this, doesn’t work, maybe this? He slowly repeats several keywords as he no doubt hunts and pecks them into the google search window. His remarks almost all have a coda of “lemme/I’ll do this real quick” and “and stuff like that.” It was really an amazing experience in rhetoric. Somehow his saying “real quick” as he prepared to do something was supposed to convey to me that he was, in fact, working at maximum speed and efficiency. And his tagging of “and stuff like that” was usually almost non-sequitur but somehow hinted that the vastness of his knowledge and/or efforts was beyond his ability to express (or at least to express it real quick). In the end, he basically said I had to download a driver from the phone manufacturer’s website, though a visit to the website showed no drivers were available for download. I suggested maybe the phone, or at least the video function, was somehow not compatible with Macs. The guy conceded that, yeah, maybe that was true. Has no one ever had this problem before? I asked. No. No, they hadn’t, he replied. I guess maybe all self-respecting Mac users have migrated to iPhones.

Justin Long, your soup is ready.

So here I am, still unable to upload my videos directly from my phone to my computer. I did find a way to pull the video off the Sprint website by using Devo’s laptop, then emailing the saved video from her computer to myself and then downloading the video from my email on my own computer. I know there is a much simpler way to achieve my goal, but I haven’t been able to properly google it yet.

caught between google and the deep blue sea