I am, therefore, I bitch

Maybe it’s because I’m sleep deprived, but it feels like nothing has been working here. Dying phones. My desktop won’t stay connected or hesitates every couple of minutes. I’m having the same trouble with my laptop at Tim’s that he’s been having with signal strength from the wireless router. On The Compound, if it’s communication-related, it’s faltering. And Mercury isn’t even in retrograde. Yet.

After waking from a post-client session/post-writers’ conference call nap (and missing my window of opportunity to go with Tom to Rich’s to watch Lindsey and Rhonda make fools of themselves to raise money), I decided to check into this signal problem we’re having. Based on research I accomplished during the five minutes that my computer worked, some geek (I say that with the utmost respect) recommended something called a “repeater.” Since my car is in the suburbs with Tim, I walked to Office Max to check on this “repeater” thing.

(By the way, my car also has problems. I can’t make the driver’s door electric lock or window work, not a good thing when I do all my pharmacy and banking at a drive-through. And Jack in the Box. Will I have to go inside for a sourdough Jack? Is it worth it? Tom says the car problem is not a fuse. It must be something that will cost at least $300 at the dealer, because I never get away from there without spending a minimum of $300. They think I should be happy because they have Starbucks coffee and a massage therapist on site who’ll give me a 15-minute neck-and-shoulder massage. Um, I know the second-best massage therapist in Houston whose rate is $75/hour, and I can get out of Starbucks drive-through at less than five dollars a trip. Or at least I could when I could lower my car window.)

On the way to Office Max, I fended off some kind of bug attack. Too big to be a mosquito (though there were plenty of those), too small to be a palmetto bug tree roach. Very big men in very big pickup trucks playing very loud music were driving through the ‘hood. What is it with big white rednecks and hip hop? Who are they kidding? They don’t intimidate me as much as having to pass one of those fuzzy little dogs on the sidewalk. (Note to self: Consider therapy for emotional damage caused by Cujo/ Creep/ Chocolate/ whatever his name really was.)

Then I jaywalked. Ha! I’m such a lawbreaker. Bring it on, hip hop rednecks.

Office Max was closed. Sort of. The exit door was still open, so I slid in and asked the cashier if they were closed. I have become my own retail nightmare. I just know she was thinking, No, dumbass, we have those bars across the door because we’re open. When she asked what I needed, I lied and told her phone batteries, because I couldn’t remember the word “repeater.”

After she graciously directed me toward the phone batteries, I found another employee and used really technical terms like “some thing that makes your wireless signal stronger that I can’t remember the name of.” He called someone else on his Office Max radio.

Those Office Max people are like cops; has anyone else ever noticed that? They’re always radioing each other. I’ll bet when no customers are around, they make that “donging” noise from Law and Order. Plus their breakroom probably has a two-way mirror and a box of stale Krispy Kremes. They could have taken me back and roughed me up for jaywalking if they hadn’t been trying to close.

The answer that Employee Two came up with was not “repeater.” It was something else. They didn’t have it in stock.

I guiltily went to the phone battery aisle. I’d actually looked at the battery pack of my dying phone earlier, so there was a remote chance I might buy the right thing, even though I didn’t have any information with me.

Paid for the battery pack. They had to unlock the door to let me out. At which point, Employee One morphed from cop wannabe to Bill the Cat, made a hairball/ack noise, and said, “Bug! On her back!” Hitchhiking bastard. Employee Three knocked it off, and I walked home.

I noted how many houses in the ‘hood:

1. Still have their tape up from Hurricane Rita. Hurricane season is like necktie widths. Wait long enough, and you look like you’re on the cusp of a trend instead of behind the times. I learned this trick from my father and my Uncle Dwight. Unfortunately, I don’t wear neckties. And I don’t want tape on my windows all year.

2. Have grass. Grass makes me bitter. I wouldn’t give up my trees to have grass, but I used to actually live in a state where you could have trees AND grass. Crazy.

3. Have fences that are falling in. Maybe I should rubberband that Robert Frost poem that says, “Good fences make good neighbors” to their gates. Except they’d probably just think it’s the fortieth Chinese takeout menu of the week and throw it away.

4. Have dogs watching me from windows. Including the one where two red mini dachshunds jumped on the back of the sofa and used their little German barks to tell me that if they could only get to me, they’d bite my ankle. Yeah, yeah. You’re not fuzzy? I don’t fear you. I’m a jaywalker, bitches.

Got home. Restarted my computer three times to try to make it work. All the lights on the cable modem showed it should be working, but I still couldn’t connect. I finally unhooked everything from the modem and restarted it. That worked. Once. I wrote this LJ entry. When I got ready to publish it? Not connected anymore. It’s Saturday night, 9 p.m. Let’s see when this thing actually makes it to my Live Journal.* There will be a correlation between the time lapse and the number of new gray hairs on my head that Tim will have to color when he returns from keeping dogs alive in the suburbs.

By the way, the phone battery pack? THE RIGHT SIZE! I suppose my luck could change…

*11:49 p.m. Two reboots and one firewall adjustment later…