Online

After all I've gone through in the past few months to get the job I currently have as a full-time position, it would seem shocking that in the home stretch, with just one simple hurdle to overcome, that things might suddenly go horribly awry. And yet, I think that came close to happening today.

The hurdle? A simple RCMP background check to verify that I am, in fact, not a criminal mastermind. Fortunately excessive parking tickets are not an offense that would cost me the job.

Blowing up NorthWest Tel, however, probably would. And I was getting near that point today.

To recap, we lost our phone and Internet access Friday evening around 6 p.m. Prompt calls to the Emergency line informed us that it would be Tuesday before anyone could come by and repair the phone because it was a long holiday weekend. I thought that bullshit, figuring that must have someone on for emergency service calls. But no, the earliest was Tuesday.

So we made do for the weekend without. And it wasn't too bad, what with the weather being excellent and Cathy leaving to go home on Monday. Really, I had better things to do than being online all the time.

So Tuesday morning comes along, I call NWT to ask when they're coming by. And then the excuses begin. They had only just entered my work request. They tested the line and it seemed fine. Still, I persisted. They promised someone would be by that day. I called again at 3 p.m. to see when they would be coming by. They promised by the end of the work day. They would call to give me a heads up on when they would need me home.

The call never came.

So by Wednesday morning I'm starting to get homicidal. No phone or Internet means I can't talk to my wife, nor can I kill time online. I call first thing in the morning. The excuses become more bizarre. Apparently they called Friday night and a teenager answered the phone and said things were fine. When I said there is no teenager in our apartment, then it apparently became the apartment super's responsibility to fix things. When I talked to them, the expressed some confusion as they don't mess with phone lines. "There are miles of the stuff in the building. We leave that to the experts." The experts, presumably, are NWT.

I was told that someone was in Friday afternoon repairing a problem in another apartment...so guess what probably happened?

So by 3 p.m. I'm becoming fairly deranged. Which is probably coming across on the phone at this point. I'm pretty close to threatening to go to the local office, finding a repair guy and drag his ass to the apartment to the fix the problem. Or, barring that, blowing up NWT in the hopes that maybe a decent phone company will come to town.

It got fixed. As best I can figure, the phone magically started to work around 4:45. At least that's when I called home on a whim and got my answering machine. No one called to ask me to let them into the apartment. No one has called to explain what went wrong in the first place.

So I guess NWT lives for another day.

But they are getting a letter of complaint and I do want a credit on the next phone bill for the five or so days I was without phone service. Good luck with that, I know. But I'm still pretty pissed off about this.