Well, THAT was fun...

Miss me? 

Friday morning. Friday is my Monday; I work at 9:30 a.m. 

My internet is dodgy. It won't stay connected. It cuts out, I relaunch my VPN and get logged in at 9:32 -- the first time I have ever been late for this job -- and IMMEDIATELY the internet cuts out again, before I can even start working. 

Go upstairs. The cheery green blinking lights are all dead and the adaptor is...holy shit. SCORCHING hot. 

Load up Microsoft Office on my phone. Email my supervisor and a few other relevant people. Then call my ISP. Explain to them how critical it is I get a new modem because I am working from home. This provoked the first black mark to TekSavvy, with whom I have been very happy. 

Agent: "You mentioned you were working from home. I can see here that you have a residential, not a business account". This was spoken in the exact same tone Dennis Nedry used in Jurassic Park: "nuh-uh-uh..."

Fuck you very much. "I'm not sure if you are aware, but we are in the middle of a global pandemic" -- I injected maximum wither into those two words -- "and I'm willing to bet you have hundreds and hundreds of customers working from home with residential accounts." 

People do tend to back right off when I lose my own customer service sheen. It's intensely satisfying. But nothing I say or do can get me a modem from them before Monday. Which is, to be fair, the next business day. It's just that I have the misfortune of working on days that are not business days. 

Choice words were uttered after I hung up. At great volume. 

Order one off Amazon. Next day delivery. Excellent: this means I will miss, at most, two shifts. I could possibly get the delivery first thing in the morning and barely miss one. No problem.

Modem arrives after my missed Saturday shift. It is not the right kind. I need a V-DSL modem. This is not one of those.

Send Eva out to Walmart and Best Buy the next day. The kind of modem we need is not sold through retail channels. It can only be obtained through your internet service provider. 

And so we wait. With Wi-Fi that works for, at most, twenty minutes at a time before cutting out -- and that's allowing that adaptor to get too hot for its own good. Eventually we unplugged. Which left us -- you've probably been there -- without television, radio or connections to the outside world. 

We're  stuck waiting until the modem from TekSavvy  FINALLY showed up at 1:30 pm today. I have lost three and a half shifts off this cheque. I can not express how frustrating this is: this was slated to be the first full cheque in MORE THAN A YEAR thanks to mandatory (and occasionally voluntary) time off and illness.  But we have a modem now, it's 5G, and everything is working. 

That was an ordeal.