The Fight of My Life...

I have to face a harsh reality.
The fight of my life is upon me.
I discovered it last night.
I dreamed about it.
I dreamed about it ALL night.

In some of the dreams, things turned out okay. In some, things turned our bad, and still in others things turned out horrible. But in none of the dreams did things turn out good or great... "okay" was the best my mind could muster.

What is my fight?
What is it I am deathly afraid of facing?

I am having problems with my Internet connection.

There, I said it. I'm having problems connecting to the Internet.

What makes me so terrified is this - there are four companies that are involved with this problem. AOL, my service provider. VERIZON, whose phone lines AOL leases to provide me my DSL. LINKSYS, who makes my wireless router. And, DELL, who makes my laptop. I am deathly afraid that I am going to have to call all four of them for help and in the past I have had the most awful technical assistance from all four of them.

AOL - always sends me to poorest speaking Indian tech people. Now, I'm not knocking the Indians who are just working to support themselves and their families - for pennies on the American dollar. I do happen to despise the companies that take thousands of jobs from Americans and send them overseas just to fatten their own bottom line... but that's another blog for another time.

VERIZON - just throws their hands up in the air immediately and says... "Call AOL!"

LINKSYS - is simply pathetic! When I first bought my Linksys router, it took me months to get it to work! Between them and AOL, I was passed around faster than a hooker at a Busta' Rhymes party! When it was all said and done and after hours of wasted time with tech support - I ended up fixing the problem myself by pure experimentation!

DELL - Oh god, don't get me started with DELL. They too like to send me to India where I have to pay several dollars a minute to struggle to understand a guy named Sanjii - who prefers to be called 'Randy.' I'm extra pissed with DELL because now that my limited warranty has expired with them, I can no longer E-Mail or Chat with them when I need technical help. Instead I have to either read their useless FAQS or PAY to talk to Sanjii.

I think I'm completely screwed.

TTBM