Red Neck Internet
By Kim Johnson
I don’t read my mail. It would be a full time job. Most of it I use to start fires. I’m not recommending my methods, simply pointing out what works for me. Every once in a blue moon I miss something. Like the notice from my internet company.
If you forget to pay a bill or accidentally incinerate it, the billing company is super nice and simply sends you a new one. Sometimes they even put big words on it like “overdue” or “final notice” as a helpful reminder. Here’s where the confusing part comes in, at least for me. Sometimes billing companies send you information that has little or nothing to do with your bill. This can be multiple pages of paper that tell you things you don’t really need to know or have time to read, like the company’s privacy policy or lists of ways the company has decided they are great. I burn these things.
My internet provider sent me something. It wasn’t a bill. I didn’t read it. I was trying to burn a brush pile; I didn’t have time to read. I added it to the fire. They sent me another one. I thought that was weird. I scanned it. They informed me I was using too much internet. I laughed. Out loud. Can you actually use too much internet? How does that even work? I was paying for internet service, I figured I could google stuff.
Toward the end of the summer things got real. I received another notice, this one was serious. You can tell when companies are serious because they use bold font and words like “terminating.” The internet was serious and this time I didn’t laugh, I inquired, not with the company, but with my children. When children are confronted with the suggestion that they might have done something wrong they use words like “huh?” and “wait, what?”
It turns out that while I was busy burning brush piles my children were downloading things. Lots of things. One of my children loves video games, he plays them on his computer and often buys and downloads them to his desktop computer. It turns out some of these games are really big in terms of gigabytes, and sometimes took a few days to download. My other child likes to binge watch Netflix. Twenty-two episodes of 30 Rock in a row. I noticed our internet was slower than usual during these times but didn’t think much of it because I was busy burning brush piles. The internet company noticed though, it turns out they keep track of these things. So I called.
Calling a large company is not fun. Forget about navigating the automated menu, when you finally get a human on the phone it’s never clear if they are giving you the correct information. In this case I talked to five different people and they all told me the same thing. We sent you a notice, you ignored it. We sent you another notice, you ignored it, so we sent you a notice to tell you your internet was being turned off. It was true, I came home from the store and found both of my children on the floor suffering from acute internet withdrawal syndrome. This syndrome is recognizable by massive eye rolling, tears, and phrases like, “I literally can’t even,” and “FML”- what ever that means.
So I called, again. This time I was the one with the tears and using phrases like “I literally can’t even…you know, google things. How can I live?” The call center was unsympathetic. I didn’t blame them, not really. It was my fault for not reading the mail or paying attention to the tiny, fine print on the contract saying…nothing about how much internet you can use, just not too much. Whatever. Insert eye roll. I’m not one to give up. I found a solution called a business account. I simply pay more money for the same service. It’s brilliant.
After six hours of no internet, a time our family refers to as the arduous march, I now keep track of who is using the internet and how much downloading is going on. We have cleverly combated the downloading problem with a laptop, capitalizing on the free internet provided by places like Starbucks, which if anyone on the hill is wondering, has seventy times faster internet download speeds than what we can get through DSL. This might not seem like a big deal for people with a high speed connection but as my children like to point out, even refugee camps have better internet than us.
Life in the country has many advantages, high speed internet isn’t one of them. Country life, however, does provide things like big trucks and generators. When it became necessary to download video game updates to my son’s desktop computer, which according to him would require a $@#% ton of internet, I told him I had a workaround. I ran the idea by my husband, a computer engineer. He made it clear he thought I was nuts but he used the phrase “theoretically workable,” and that was all I needed to hear. We loaded the desk top computer, monitor, keyboard, mouse, the whole shebang into the truck. We put the generator in the back. We grabbed an extension cord and drove to Starbucks. It only took six hours and five cups of coffee to download all of the updates, something that would have taken weeks at home. Unencrypted wireless and coffee. Two things that are so great, I literally can’t even.
I don’t read my mail. It would be a full time job. Most of it I use to start fires. I’m not recommending my methods, simply pointing out what works for me. Every once in a blue moon I miss something. Like the notice from my internet company.
If you forget to pay a bill or accidentally incinerate it, the billing company is super nice and simply sends you a new one. Sometimes they even put big words on it like “overdue” or “final notice” as a helpful reminder. Here’s where the confusing part comes in, at least for me. Sometimes billing companies send you information that has little or nothing to do with your bill. This can be multiple pages of paper that tell you things you don’t really need to know or have time to read, like the company’s privacy policy or lists of ways the company has decided they are great. I burn these things.
My internet provider sent me something. It wasn’t a bill. I didn’t read it. I was trying to burn a brush pile; I didn’t have time to read. I added it to the fire. They sent me another one. I thought that was weird. I scanned it. They informed me I was using too much internet. I laughed. Out loud. Can you actually use too much internet? How does that even work? I was paying for internet service, I figured I could google stuff.
Toward the end of the summer things got real. I received another notice, this one was serious. You can tell when companies are serious because they use bold font and words like “terminating.” The internet was serious and this time I didn’t laugh, I inquired, not with the company, but with my children. When children are confronted with the suggestion that they might have done something wrong they use words like “huh?” and “wait, what?”
It turns out that while I was busy burning brush piles my children were downloading things. Lots of things. One of my children loves video games, he plays them on his computer and often buys and downloads them to his desktop computer. It turns out some of these games are really big in terms of gigabytes, and sometimes took a few days to download. My other child likes to binge watch Netflix. Twenty-two episodes of 30 Rock in a row. I noticed our internet was slower than usual during these times but didn’t think much of it because I was busy burning brush piles. The internet company noticed though, it turns out they keep track of these things. So I called.
Calling a large company is not fun. Forget about navigating the automated menu, when you finally get a human on the phone it’s never clear if they are giving you the correct information. In this case I talked to five different people and they all told me the same thing. We sent you a notice, you ignored it. We sent you another notice, you ignored it, so we sent you a notice to tell you your internet was being turned off. It was true, I came home from the store and found both of my children on the floor suffering from acute internet withdrawal syndrome. This syndrome is recognizable by massive eye rolling, tears, and phrases like, “I literally can’t even,” and “FML”- what ever that means.
So I called, again. This time I was the one with the tears and using phrases like “I literally can’t even…you know, google things. How can I live?” The call center was unsympathetic. I didn’t blame them, not really. It was my fault for not reading the mail or paying attention to the tiny, fine print on the contract saying…nothing about how much internet you can use, just not too much. Whatever. Insert eye roll. I’m not one to give up. I found a solution called a business account. I simply pay more money for the same service. It’s brilliant.
After six hours of no internet, a time our family refers to as the arduous march, I now keep track of who is using the internet and how much downloading is going on. We have cleverly combated the downloading problem with a laptop, capitalizing on the free internet provided by places like Starbucks, which if anyone on the hill is wondering, has seventy times faster internet download speeds than what we can get through DSL. This might not seem like a big deal for people with a high speed connection but as my children like to point out, even refugee camps have better internet than us.
Life in the country has many advantages, high speed internet isn’t one of them. Country life, however, does provide things like big trucks and generators. When it became necessary to download video game updates to my son’s desktop computer, which according to him would require a $@#% ton of internet, I told him I had a workaround. I ran the idea by my husband, a computer engineer. He made it clear he thought I was nuts but he used the phrase “theoretically workable,” and that was all I needed to hear. We loaded the desk top computer, monitor, keyboard, mouse, the whole shebang into the truck. We put the generator in the back. We grabbed an extension cord and drove to Starbucks. It only took six hours and five cups of coffee to download all of the updates, something that would have taken weeks at home. Unencrypted wireless and coffee. Two things that are so great, I literally can’t even.
|
|