The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

‘If you decide to leave civilization, expect to live without its comforts.’ I don’t know who said that but they were absolutely right. We live down at the bottom end of a skinny island 17 miles from the bridge that connects it to the mainland and all things modern. Shopping malls (before they started closing), restaurants and taverns (before Covid shut them down, schools (before they went virtual), theaters (before the plague hit), all those amenities folks took for granted until the Coronovirus Epidemic of 2020.

I feel sorry for folks, I really do. But … we got our own problems. Down by us we live across the great digital divide. Meaning we finally got DSL internet, not the old dial-up, but because our ‘provider’, and I use that phrase loosely, doesn’t deem it worthwhile to provide better fiber optics this far from Rome, we have very slow internet. Better than the old dial-up, okay, but nothing like you might have expected from the promises our provider made when Ma Bell was broken into Baby Bells. If we try to watch a movie streaming over Netflix, the buffering is nearly as long as most commercials on TV. A two hour movie becomes three hours. Plenty of time to make popcorn, grab another beer (or three), check our email (which is now even slower), use the restroom (even mop and clean it), do the laundry, wash the dishes and take out the garbage. We get a lot done watching a movie we probably won’t even like.

The mizzus ran into the ‘provider’ yesterday, some guy in a truck from the new outfit that bought the old outfit, now called Zipley. What a name! You just know the service will improve. Fast internet? Sure, zipley. The name says it all. She wanted to know, confronting this poor schmuck with the toolbelt laden with every electronic gizmo hanging from his waist, when we’d be getting better internet. He was busy, he told her, hooking up ‘cross cable’ and didn’t really know when, if, why, or how faster internet would be coming to the wild South End. And … he was a little too busy cross cabling to chat with her further. So much for anything remotely resembling zipley.

I don’t know doodley about most things technical. If I can’t fix it with a wrench or a screwdriver or just pounding it on a table or throwing it on the floor, I have no real comprehension. Black boxes are just that to me. Magic electrons, ethereal waves, wifi, routers, servers, providers, very large monthly bills. The mizzus knows this stuff and believe me when I tell you she didn’t like some macho yahoo with a toolbelt talking down to her like she was the little woman at the service desk of a car repair shop telling her her whatchamacallit was acting up and maybe she should sit quietly in the waiting room and read a woman’s magazine until the repairmen had finished. Somebody was cross cabled all right. The trouble was, it was probably us. If you think Zipley implies something speedy, forgetaboutit. It really means zip up yer lip, Lady.

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