Erroneous assumptions

A reasonable person, upon arriving home to find little flags in the lawn, utility marker paint all over the street, and a town crew busily digging up the next intersection down the street, could conclude that the fact that we had no internet/phone/cable had some sort of relation to the work of this town water crew. That cable is not buried but in fact carried overhead concerned me not, for it would be easy to catch an overhead cable with a backhoe. For those of used to getting our entertainment from the web in the evenings, it was excruciating. I cannot quit any time I want, I'll now admit it -- if that means I never have to go without the internet for an entire evening again. In addition, this eggs-in-one-basket approach's already obvious limitations became appreciately more obvious when all our communication utilities went out at once. (The week before, we had lost two out of three -- modem trouble, they said.)

But it turns out that the old blame-the-town-workers gambit, a cheap and effective tool for most situations in the neighborhood, could not have been more wrong in this instance. In fact, in some way that has not been clearly explained, the catastrophic loss of the last major business and community center in Cohoes, the Golden Krust Bakery, in an awful fire yesterday afternoon was somehow the reason for our loss of cable service. (Cohoes, by the way, is 10 miles away, and on the other side of the river.) And service actually came back up before the night was out. Alone among my utilities, I give mad props to Time Warner for super-excellent service -- when you call, you talk to human beings. When they can't fix it over the phone, they send someone out. Who fixes it. The first time. I love them. (That's how bad the state of consumer affairs has gotten -- that the level of service that we used to consider a bare minimum is now the shining example which no other companies will care to follow.)

So we had a long evening with only satellite radio and books to entertain us. We've grown accustomed, of late, to having the TV on with the sound off, while listening to Howard Stern on satellite. It's perfect -- a picture of something moving, don't much care what, combined with the funniest show on the radio. Perfect. But I finally finished "Hoot," the first of Hiaasen's young adult-oriented books (read the second one, "Flush," first -- both great), and am now on to something I picked up over the weekend, "The Brief History of the Dead." Hope it's good.