The World According to Chuck

I sat in the waiting room of a county agency the other day, a place in most cases you don’t want to be and where you probably don’t want to make waves, enough said. People have firearms, etc.

And I wasn’t personally dealing with red tape at the moment, although God knows I’ve done plenty of that in the past months and I’ve only just begun.

But I watched an angry man come into this office and it was fascinating. He was big and imposing, and he was ticked. I admired the way he kept his voice measured and calm when he addressed the receptionist, and his obvious awareness that his problem was not of her making. Still, she was going through steps and he wasn’t buying it.

“I’m not interested in your chain of command,” he said. “I’m not an employee, and this isn’t the Army.”

“Well,” she replied, also not getting flustered, “we’re sort of set up like the Army.”

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s why I joined the Navy, but anyway…”

This man became my personal hero for a while.

Details drive me crazy; it’s a character flaw. I tend to skip steps, assume inefficiency and bureaucratic nonsense and want to cut to the chase, which is the best way to approach most things except when it’s not. This can get you in trouble in certain situations. Tax forms. Constructing nuclear weapons. Other stuff.

So, like everyone else, I have to obey the rules sometimes, indulge bureaucrats and follow directions, but I don’t have to like it.

Knowing my tendencies, though, I create my own little paranoia bubble at times like these, when I’m about to set off for a two-week trip and know that I’m forgetting to do something necessary, vital and important.

I’m grateful for technology. It’s easy to carry my laptop with me and that holds my life; I’d rather be at the mercy of electricity, hard drives and WiFi than my disorganized brain.

And phone numbers, etc., are stored in my cell phone. Which also functions as an excellent camera and notepad. These two pieces of the 21st century constitute 90%, probably, of the stress relief I’m looking for. Got ‘em? Good to go, mostly; there’s always a Target for the rest.

So here I am, 2 days left, Friday and Saturday, which are, as it turns out, the two busiest days of the week for me anyway. And I’m still left with the Verizon Situation, by which I mean I need reliable broadband access in a variety of locales for the next two weeks and so far that’s not happening.

My plan was to tether my phone to my laptop; in other words, use its 3G function as a modem. I bought a month’s worth of data time. I have a cable. What could be simpler?

Except it hasn’t worked so far; something is preventing me from connecting, and the usual suspects (i.e., firewall, bad cable, gremlins) have been ruled out. And the good folks at Verizon are so stumped that they are seriously ignoring me, pretending that tech support is working ’round the clock to solve my problem when I know, you know, they know, we all know that they are doing no such thing.

So I fix that today, one way or the other. I’m only waiting for the Verizon store to open so I can see a human being in person. I plan on being polite and calm but visibly angry, and let’s hope they don’t make a comment about the Army, because I got me a comeback, you betcha.