July 2005

I get to have my husband back tomorrow night, after nearly three weeks. I was thinking about it last night as I drove home from visiting my parents in Greensboro (and taking the really wrong scenic route, which gave me lots of extra time for thinking), and I’m pretty sure they’ve probably never been away from each other for more than a week or so at a time…

Of course, there was never family on the other end of the country in their case — other than me, and I was shared. In fact, all my aunts and uncles but one have lived within thirty miles of the towns where they were born for their entire lives. Men of their generation got their wanderlust out of the way in the military, but sometimes I think some of the women — my mom and my aunts — feel just a little regret at never having lived away for a while…

That said, I’m really glad my mom is at least comfortable traveling even if my dad prefers to stay at home. She gets around pretty well, and I keep encouraging her to blow my inheritance getting around even more…

How does Bellsouth suck? Let me count the ways…

I get home tonight and find that I have no dial tone. I try to call from a cell phone and (of course) all the repair service lines are busy. I don’t even get a recording, just an immediate, constant busy signal. So I go online to report the outage. I find the service request form. I fill in all the information. It won’t transmit; it repeatedly gives me a Javascript error telling me to enter alphanumeric characters only, but naturally it doesn’t tell me which field is the problem. After several minutes of trial and error, I get the wild idea that maybe I have to enter something in the extension field (because most residential subscribers are on Centrex systems with extension numbers, right?), so I list “0000” as my extension number, and the form actually transmits…

Not only can they not deliver phone service nor DSL. The fuckers can’t even create a simple HTML form that validates properly…