Well I’m sad to report that I was supposed to be on a date with P tonight but am instead sitting here on my couch because Caroline has come down with a touch of the stomach bug. Or she ate something that didn’t agree with her. We’re still not sure which one, but I’m sure we’ll know in the next 24 hours if anyone else falls victim.
We were supposed to drop her off at Bops and Mimi’s late this afternoon. However, it became apparent that wasn’t going to happen and, frankly, I blame Dish Network.
How is this possibly Dish Network’s fault, you may ask? Because they were the beginning of my week not going quite as planned. Because of them, I missed 24 on Monday night and I believe that one thing caused my whole week to fall apart. I realize this seems like a heavy burden to place on them, but I don’t care.
On Monday morning I immediately logged into the Chat feature on Dish Network to report our Dish receiver outage. I have found that I prefer typing my issues furiously into the computer as opposed to spending hours on the phone where you also have to make awkward small talk about the weather. This probably also explains why I have a blog.
Anyway, I explained that our receiver wasn’t working and continuously told us it needed to do a hard drive reset and had lost all our recordings including True Tori. Of course the person I was chatting with is most likely based in India and isn’t aware of the intricacies of Tori and Dean’s marriage so she wasn’t really as sympathetic as I would have liked. But she did apologize that I had to spend my valuable time taking care of my television problems in a sentence that had to be directly taken from a Dish Network employee handbook entitled “You put the ‘U’ in Customer Service”.
So I told her we had repeatedly reset and unplugged and turned off our receiver while sitting on the couch and standing on our hand and clicking our heels three times and reciting “There’s no place like home”. And she immediately replied with “You need to reset your receiver. Unplug it, wait for ten seconds, plug it back in and turn it on again”.
I never would have thought of that.
But I did it for the eighty-fourth time and, in what was a shock to absolutely no one, it failed to fix the problem. She said they could send me a new receiver in five business days.
Five business days.
Sure. Like I have enough hobbies to be without a T.V. for five days.
I typed back that this was unacceptable and asked if I could go pick one up or have it delivered that day because JACK BAUER. And, miraculously, they were able to suddenly overnight one. Even better, they were only going to charge me $20 instead of $35. Which led to me to ask why I was being charged anything considering that I was already going to miss Jack Bauer and it wasn’t my fault that their equipment had circled the drain. And, miraculously, they were suddenly able to waive all charges. It’s amazing how that works, but why do you have to be a squeaky wheel to make it happen?
The new receiver arrived on Tuesday afternoon and I was able to read the instructions and get it set up and working so that P and Caroline could watch T.V. that evening while I went to see The Fault in Our Stars with Gulley.
I had read the book over a year ago and so I felt like I was emotionally prepared. But based on my sobbing, it’s safe to say I was not. Gulley and I had what we refer to as a “My Girl” or “Hope Floats” situation based on the extreme crying we both experienced in those movies. It’s a rarely experienced level of emotional anguish over what is supposed to be entertainment yet causes a level ten Kleenex situation. All that to say, I really loved the movie. I couldn’t imagine how they were going to capture the feeling of the book and especially Augustus Waters, but they did a fantastic job. Just know that it may be best not to see it if you’ve already missed Jack Bauer on Monday and in an emotionally fragile state.
On Wednesday morning we woke up to thunderstorms which was absolutely delightful and ended up spending the day doing not much of anything. I ran a few errands, specifically to the pet store to get the puppies more things to chew on that aren’t the plants in our backyard and the frame of our back door.
And now we’re missing date night and watching T.V. on our new receiver that seems to be working beautifully. Except that it is lacking Jack Bauer.