May the fleas of a thousand camels invade your shorts, Verizon

BACK WHEN Wikipedia was promoting a rumor that I’m secretly a Sufi mystic, I wish I’d had the presence of mind to coin a properly horrifying curse to hurl at my foes, along the lines of, May you spend all eternity talking to customer service.

Verizon, specifically, or, as I like to refer to them, those bastards. Here in Little Rhody we render that as “bastids,” “rat bastids” and, ultimately, “rotten rat bastids,” depending on the severity of the bastidry. The rodent angle certainly fits, given that Verizon’s incisors never seem to wear down as they gnaw on your wallet.

Last week we find out Verizon is jacking up the cost of our internet connection by 77 percent. This is to compensate for the fact they’ve had no increase from us in two whole years. Quite the ordeal, that; clearly, the business-world equivalent of us herding the suits at bayonet point along the Battan Peninsula.

So after hours of dealing with the company chat line, then the real-live-person line, the very best they can do is continue to provide the same service for a 23-percent increase. And at that they want you to feel you’re getting away with a steal of a deal, valued customer.

So… you can either eat it or go through the hassle of switching over to Cox, which will treat you every bit as badly as Verizon does, and all that will do is reinforce your growing suspicion that Capitalism will destroy Us just as surely as Communism destroyed Them.

Since life is short, we’re paying the 23 percent increase and calling it a present to ourselves; a fee that buys us the pleasure, for the next two years, of not ever once thinking about the rotten rat bastids.

I mustn’t leave you thinking the best part of living in Little Rhody is the swell epithets, so I’ll mention that my day started at 4:45 a.m. when I gave Daughter #1 a lift to the airport. Like her husband, she works out of an office here at the humble manse, she in sales, he in medical publishing. She also travels for her new job. Last week it was Chicago and Seattle, this morning she was headed for San Francisco.

There’s D1, with Significant Other 1.

This will make us the envy of many, but early in the morning the drive time from here to the airport is 8 minutes, door to door. Many people have to drive for hours to get to an airport.

Because I was up early, I saw the most recent post come in from “Another Blog, Meanwhile.” I follow the scribble there because the writer, Joseph Nebus, occasionally mocks the Phantom, and, by extension, we his creators. But he mocks us intelligently, which appeals to my sense of mischief.

The Phantom, by the way, is in the States these days, in New Mexico. He’s fired up his 1934 DH.88 de Havilland Comet Racer and means to check on things at Walker’s Table, the towering butte claimed by one of his ancestors in 1499. But, hmm… seems like trespassers are up there waiting for him.

I find Another Blog, Meanwhile’s treatment of our Phantom yarns refreshing because most of the mockery out there is of the lame-o class-clown variety. Nebus, on the other hand, does an entertaining job when he gets us in his sights.

This morning, he was talking about how tough it is to come up with a good name for a blog, and lamenting that The Onion once quoted Another Blog, Meanwhile without naming him as the writer. Ouch.

Now and again I’ll post a comment. Here’s what I thought to add this morning before I got the coffee pot going. BTW, the time stamp is wrong, it was more like 6:13 a.m.

Tony DePaul, November 7, 2017, Cranston, Rhode Island, USA