Only Connect

I immediately called Sympatico to straighten things out, but the person at the end of the interminable voicemail maze insisted that evanstone@sympatico.ca was in use by someone else. “That’s me!” I kept saying. “I am evanstone!” Finally I gave up and used my old evanstone@sympatico.ca address via web mail—which was a disaster because I couldn’t figure out how to create a contact list that would “autofill” the recipient’s name when I sent a new message. Since it was too much trouble to type the address every time, I ended up corresponding only with people who emailed me first, so I could just press “reply.”

A lot more happened during this period—like readjusting my entire social, domestic, and emotional life—but the main thing I remember is that my email kept breaking down. Various tech-support people changed my various passwords, which got me on-line in fits and starts, but overall led to a very unstable existence. Also, because I was using both evanstone and ellenvanstone4, depending on which one was working that day, all my user names and passwords got mixed up on my monthly statements. One day, a technician sorted it all out and gave me yet another new password—the idiot-proof, standard-issue abc123. And then, for no apparent reason, that one stopped working too.

For a couple of weeks I went without email to show Bell Sympatico that I didn’t need them. But since I work from home, I eventually felt compelled to call the tech-support line yet again. The technician, as always, was very nice. He couldn’t figure out why my password wasn’t working, but he did go to the website himself to access my account and read my emails to me. Privacy was not an issue. At this point in my shipwrecked existence I was beyond trying to cling to any shred of dignity.

Throughout those first few months, one glitch was particularly annoying. Every time I went on-line, a passport.net window appeared with my ex-partner’s name solidly entrenched in my sign-in box, left there from the one or two times he had used my computer in happier days. I entered and re-entered my name and password and ticked off the “please remember my sign-in” box about fifty times, but I could not get rid of him.

I decided to buy a new computer and ordered a Dell, which came with three free months of Rogers cable Internet service—meaning, I could cancel Sympatico forever. It was a big decision, especially after getting the evanstone@sympatico.ca address back, but I thought it was important to embrace change in my life.

For a number of irritating reasons, which my editors forbid me to list here, it took much longer than expected for my new computer to arrive. I lurched along with Sympatico in an increasingly frustrated state, until the day half the lights on my modem suddenly died. I think I triggered the problem by using a phone-line extension cord. But even when I took everything apart and put it back together using the official Sympatico cords, nothing happened. I was completely cut off.

Some days during this down time, I enjoyed the solitude. Other days, I relieved the tedium by idly phoning for technical support. I talked to a lot of technicians. They were all excellent. I often think, if only I’d married a technician my life might have turned out quite differently.

There was some slight discord with one guy, but that was my fault. We’d been on the phone for about half an hour, and getting along pretty well. I’d gotten into the habit of asking the technicians about themselves while waiting for my computer to reboot or my modem to light up. Anyway, this guy, John in New Brunswick, at one point asked me something like “When you attempt to log in to your account via the Internet, what appears on your screen?” I answered, “The same little box keeps appearing. You know—the little box that tells you to quit trying and fuck off.” I could feel the ice through the line. Wow. I thought everyone said fuck. Hasn’t it entered the language? Not in New Brunswick apparently. Maybe he was a Bible student or something. I felt terrible. I also wondered if it was illegal to use profanity over the phone with a technician and if Sympatico would cancel my account on grounds of moral turpitude before I got a chance to cancel them first.

The next time I spoke to a technician, Mustafa in Montreal, I was careful to be correct and dignified. Mustafa, however, seemed positively flirtatious. Could he tell from my file that I was single? Or was I just so out of it that I was now mistaking technician pity for a come-on? Still, it was a strangely intimate exercise. Mustafa went through all my connections with me. He had me go around the apartment unhooking phones and doubling up filters on extensions, disconnecting and then reconnecting the modem and so forth. I had to move furniture around because the phone jack is behind the couch and then I was crawling around under the desk making sure everything was snugly attached. I wondered if these guys were ever tempted to say something like, “Okay, now hold the modem over your head and lift up your right foot and shake it all about.”

I talked to a friend about this. She wondered if the technicians had a lot of women coming on to them. We imagined the kinds of things an improper technician might say: “What is your phone number with area code, please? What is your operating system? What’s the number on the bottom of your modem? What are you wearing? Are you wearing a bra with an underwire that could be interfering with the signal? Do the lights on your modem keep flashing after you have removed your brassiere?” And so forth.