I guess it would be naive to believe that a Friday the 13th could go by without having to endure at least one little slice of hell, but this was the picture I saw when I walked into the Comcast Service Store in order to exchange my fried cable modem for a working one, instead of waiting an indeterminate time frame for a technician to come out to my home to do it. For the 26 minutes that I was there, I was the the only customer in the entire building that was not black.
Georgia did away with DMVs and instead has two different divisions that deal with acquiring licenses and license plates. I’ve dealt with the licenses online, and I’d been fortunate to have dealt with my plates at such odd hours when I was still a contractor, to where it wasn’t an inconvenience. But the misery of something reminiscent of DMV lines clearly still exists, in this Comcast Service Store.
And this is just the inside. It’s actually poetic how succinctly I nailed my prediction to what this experience was going to be like before even arriving. The parking lot was full of cars all backed into parking spaces, many of which were various older Chevrolets on aftermarket, chrome rims, many of them with occupants still sitting in them, with the music on, loudly and full of bass. Glass diamonds of previously shattered windshields were seen in at least two different parking spaces, and there were large patches of deeply oil marks on the asphalt from the shoddy plumbing and subsequent leaks of the aforementioned old Chevrolets. I mentally patted myself on the back for nailing a place I had never been to before.
Back inside, as predicted, the majority of the people in line were there to dispute some sort of billing issues. Or to just pay their bills, in cash, of course. That’s why it only took me 26 minutes to be in and out of there. Ironically, the store had two kiosks where bills could be scanned and paid electronically, but that would of course rely upon people having credit cards. Despite the fact that they took cash, it deposited no change, instead taking any overpayment as credit towards the next month’s bill, so long story short, not a single soul was using them.
Needless to say, I got my new modem, only to find out that for whatever reason, it didn’t like synching up with the SonnyChiba router, and I had to spend two hours or so on a combination of the phone as well as the internet before resigning myself to the fact that I’d have to pull all 35 MAC addresses I’ve allowed router access, and resetting the router outright, manually inputting them all back in, and re-applying all my security measures, which is the one thing I was hoping to avoid, but couldn’t.
Regardless, I’m back online now, and I feel some relief in that regard. I can LoL, play zbs, or use my mobile devices at optimal connectivity once again, and honestly, sometimes I like tinkering around with gadgets and computer shit, trying to troubleshoot and figure out minor issues.
