Welcome back, I assume you enjoyed the puppies. We left off on our story at the vicious modem refusing to bear its electronic burden, instead opting to commit ritual sepuku on a regular basis. I was driven temporarily insane, either from the lack of constant internet or because of solar flares, it could have been either of those. My “better half” remained fairly gnostic through the process, not being the designated male of the tribe she was required to have no dealings with evil cable companies.
Now, to say that they were an evil company, one must have extensive experience of their malicious torturings. Little did I know at the time, but upon calling most major cable companies for service issues, their default response is none at all. This means, the company themselves do nothing, instead a local cable repair company is telephoned (or perhaps telegraphed) in to resolve the issue. God forbid there be several problems, or as he consults his employee handbook the local repairman might find the following steps:
a – find company issue tazer within your tool-pouch
b – render consumer immobile
c – take consumer’s wallet and leave premises immediately
This didn’t actually happen, thankfully only one thing was wrong with our internet. That thing, unfortunately, was the company’s service. A non-satirical look into the local repairman’s handbook actually reads:
a – Do not learn how to properly speak english
b – Never look like you’re entirely sure of what you are doing
c – Replace any visible (read: outside of the vertical drywall things we call – walls) cables or splitters, as these are prone to breaking due to their primary use of wringing consumer’s throats
d – Make consumer sign piece of paper whether or not you actually did anything
I actually danced this tango with the company three times. Each time requesting an actual, company-logo wearing, technician to solve the problem which I knew was an issue with the company’s main lines / hardware. I’m younger then 30, I grew up not unlike Keanu Reeves in the Matrix, amid coiled cables and the dulcet hum of machines going about their machinations. I know gosh damned perfectly well if a problem with my “services” is a simple cable or splitter problem, or even a hardware issue inside my apartment. It’s like a spider sense, when something isn’t working, certain parts of the body just itch with it. These local cable-repairmen were doing me no services I could not do on my own or had not already done.
Possibly the more terrible piece of this puzzle is the customer service which I recieved while on the phone with this company, during my several tries to get said logo-wielding technician to come out and tell me that it was, in fact, a Company Hardline / Hardware problem. At one point the man on the phone began to yell that I was attempting to tell him how to do his job by simply inquiring if they could send technicians out on the weekends, as I’d already had to miss two work days to be home for my “1-4” and “4-8” appointments. What these really mean is, he’ll either show up at exactly the start of the appointment, or he’ll call thirty minutes after the end of it to say they’ll be coming between the times of the later appointment. THUS NEGATING THE PURPOSE OF ME STAYING HOME. I normally wouldn’t mind, except that work had become my only consistent connection to my nurturing, glowing mother figure (the internet). This also meant that I was at home without means nor methods to play World of Warcraft, which makes me cry just thinking about it. Perhaps his yelling would have meant anything, if I didn’t follow it up with saying that I’d seen a comcast van at our building the saturday previous. Needless to say I hung up on him quickly, and called again with full confidence that I would be talking to someone in a completely different zip code then that man, and promptly filed a complaint against this “generic first name” man.
The end of this tangent is that I eventually managed to get a Company certified technician to come out, through no effort shorter then actually personally going in to their offices and talking face to face with someone (who was actually very nice to deal with). Maybe the company’s phone operator training includes some sort of ball-torture, thus casuing all of the males to be consumed with rage and answer their phonecalls accordingly. I’m not sure, I don’t work in their training department. When this Company Tech did finally come out, he quickly diagnosed the problem as a main line issue, something which the local guys neither knew or could do anything about, in addition he added,
“A lot of other people in the building have reported the same problems.”
Needless to say, I was satisfied at least initially that my initial predictions as to the cause of the problem were spot on. Now I’m not calling myself a new Nostradamus or anything, there had been constructiong of new condos going on in the development that involved a lot of digging and re-paving of road nearby that I could tell consisted with power lines and various other ‘utilities’. Had our toilet erupted in a fecal geyser, I most likely would have only been surprised on the surface.
As the trials and tribulations draw to a close, you may be thinking there is some epic conclusion, grandiose in scale and fantastical in duration. Unfortunately this is not the case, as I had dreamt of something along the lines of a Muscle-bound Company Tech venturing into our walk-in closet and, hours later, emerging entwined in the claws of a demonic serpent, justly proclaiming, “HERE’s your problem!” and decapitating it after a grand old tussle. As I said, this was (unfortunately) not the case. As I remember it, there was simply one day where we suddenly noticed the pain was gone. Our internet persisted for first one hour, then a second consecutive hour, and we being trained by months of cruel taunting never fully gained hope for fear that at the very moment we did it the problem would resurface, in a full-suit of spikey armor. We couldn’t handle that, so it was really only a few days later that we completely realised that the problem was in fact gone.
This story, in full, is precisely How a Guild Dies. (titular!) Upon our triumphant return to the lands of Azeroth we found our guild fragmented and mostly absent. Don’t take this the wrong way, we by no means fault the former members for their decisions, we simply lament the aformentioned troubles that led to such a sundering. For those of you who do not know, once you have a freshly ground character the (current) highest level of 60 the “end-game” content comes into full swing, first in dungeons requiring 5-10 and even sometimes 15 people to complete, and are often quite challenging even with a very skilled team, then later into even larger bosses and longer instances requiring upwards of 20 to the maximum of 40 people to complete. Our guild never really had the delusion of completing the huge scale stuff, but the lower numbers would have been tactically flawless and utterly efficient. In the absence of its leaders, the guild grew quiet and had no real direction, members became antsy over the glorious spoils of the untapped bountious dungeons, and were easily drawn away to larger, more established guilds with schedules, required attendance, and most importantly the capability and the leadership to complete the greatest of the end-game content.
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