The World Ended For Us Yesterday

Major Crisis At Home

I wanted to open up to this blog and let you know that my family’s world came crashing down very unexpectedly yesterday afternoon around 4:00pm.

It was a weekend when I had my children and it was hot and oppressively muggy out so we were pretty much indoors for most of the day. We had made plans for the upcoming week–a visit to a friends house to go tubing behind their boat, a trip to the library for some fresh reading materials, a discussion about my son editing some photos for me, and a trip to the UPS store to send back a sick X Box to Microsoft.

I left the house to go walk the dog and had planned on making a great london broil steak later in the evening. When I left, I truly felt all was well in my family.

Until I returned to find out that Comcast was out! I am not talking just television, but the whole shebang–television, telephone and (imagine the horror) THE INTERNET!

As I walked in the door, I was greeted with wails of pain and sorrow. There was absolutely nothing to do. How were we going to survive? Without phone service I could not call Comcast to tell them (or listen to their idiotic message about going online to get help connecting to the internet).

Well, I grabbed a cell phone and made the call. After hearing the recording of Ben Stein and Shaquille O’Neil, I was finally connected with a chipper representative that told me it was a “great day at Comcast”. I told her I was sure it was, they were making money and not having to provide any service to do so. Who wouldn’t want that kind of day?

She was extremely helpful (insert sarcasm here) to my plight. Obviously she did not realize the severity of the crisis to three kids between the ages of 12 and 17. She pulled my account up and triumphantly announced “yes, I see an outage”. (insert more sarcasm here) When questioned if she could see how long the outage would last she said that her “outage system” was “out” and she could not tell me. Without a resolution, I hung up with some satisfaction that her “great” day may be taking a turn for the worse. Misery loves company!

I broke the news to the kids. The wailing and crying and tantrums began. They found religion and began praying to some new God called Verizon FIOS–but apparently this God must not be in the office on Saturdays because their pleas were unanswered.

Being the resourceful dad that I am, I suggested we watch a DVD (we only have a few hundred of them) or play a game! Once the shock wore off, they began to surrender to the notion of an evening without Comcast.

We played a bunch of card games, and I even learned a new one called ERS (and got my butt kicked). We settled down with the Haunting In Connecticut and followed it up with Oceans 11. OK, so maybe I turn the other cheek on the R rated horror and action movies and am not such a good Dad.

But by 10:00pm, the phones started to chirp and the internet sputtered back to life and Hannah Montana was back in full force.

Life was once again good!  WHEW!