This Was Supposed To Be A Paperless Society By The Year 2000. Remember That?

 Remember the days when you got a new telephone?  You paid 25 dollars to get a new line, they gave you your choice of phone and a cord, and you plugged in the cord and lifted the receiver of the phone and got a dial tone?  

It's taken two days to get my new modern big-girl phone activated.  One of the things they got hung up on was verification data. They wanted my fathers' middle name.

My father did not have a middle name.  This seemed to bum the service representative out.  Now my mother had about three middle names and a maiden name too, but no.  My fathers full, obscure, weird, foreign Finnish name was not good enough for my new telephone services' needs.  They are welcome to dig my father up and yell at him for not having a middle name.  There's nothing I can do about it.

There were also a series of secret number sequences and codes I had to enter to gain access to new 'rooms' of this dungeon quest.  The Boss would present me with more obscure questions to answer, and more numeric sequences to enter in order to gain the next goal on my journey.  It was honestly like this.

I'd like to say that this was really me who did this stuff, but it was actually the Biker.  

Once he activated my new phone, he had to contact my old telephone company and go through a similar routine. Chad from Hyderabad put him on hold a number of times so he could keep up his service quota (they count the number of hangups on the line and use this as a way to judge how many problems the representative is getting solved.  Which is nice for the representative, but not so awesome for the customer trying to talk to someone with a heavy Hyderabadian accent.) 

We are in the middle of day two of the Great Phone Switchover, and have been told that it will be another couple of hours before the phone is 'fully activated.'  Jesus, haul it up on an iron gurney during a fuckin' lightning storm or something!  It worked for Frankenstein!  I mean really?  Really?

____________________________________

The man who mows all the civic landscape features and I are friends.  I keep the parking strip out front mowed and edged, and he can skip right over it.  It takes this poor dude five days to mow and edge all the little stuff around town, like parking strips and easements and the city park and waterside trails, and it's a neverending process.  He has it down, though.  Seeing this guy mow across a super steep grade at 20 mph, neat and efficient, is a treat.

  He brought me a bunch of lilacs last year as a thank-you present, and this year they're all blooming and smelling like Heaven.  Lesson:  Be good to your city employees and they will be good to you.  Turns out he's a cool guy.  We hung out in the driveway yesterday and he discussed mass corpse disposal in foreign countries.  I like anybody who can discuss low-tech mass cremation AND use a quad-deck rollover mower like a stock car.

The dude who mows the big lots, like the school playground and undeveloped civic holdings is also a buddy of mine.  He'll get right up on my north border and save me a bunch of trouble because I have carniverous roses on that side, and his platoon of mower decks fits right underneath that and snug up against the wire fence.

  I have  mower envy, actually.  Big Mowing Guy drives one of those big machines that have the wings on each side with six decks on each wing, and they raise and lower, and he can tool down the road and mow the super steep ditches.  I would love to have this job.  I would be a menace to public safety, but this would be one mowed-ass town.  I would mow the shit out of it.

Just like Forest Gump.  Yup.