Only Connect

It sounds as if I spent my life talking on the phone with pleasant technicians. Not true. I spent days at a time without email access and too demoralized to phone Bell yet again. What would I say? “Please, please, help me . . . I’ve fallen into a deep depression and I can’t get up.” At one point, I kept thinking of the feeling I had in grade school, when our daily dose of catechism featured mesmerizing tales of martyrs being tortured to death and the inevitability of being tempted to commit a mortal sin which would stain our souls and consign us to eternal damnation if we died without confessing in time. As a child, I sometimes imagined the whole world was a trick that God was playing on me to test my faith—that I was the only person on earth and everyone else, even my mom, was the devil in disguise, put there to lead me into temptation.

I guess you could say I was feeling a little paranoid. Also, I couldn’t stop talking to people about my email problems, including all the people in my condo building. The man who lives above me said that Bell Sympatico had told him he had email problems because of a “dirty line” and that maybe I should get a technician to come out and see if my line was dirty. I wasn’t entirely sure how to take this advice.

Meanwhile, in the months after my move, as my email repeatedly broke down, a few friends and editors became irritated because they couldn’t reach me. I eagerly related my tragic email history, delighted to have a captive audience, but even to my ears it began to sound like the dog ate my homework. So I stopped making excuses. I let them assume I was too inept to sustain a simple email address, let alone a relationship. It was true, wasn’t it? I started to wonder if maybe I shouldn’t have moved out. Maybe if I hadn’t been forced to disconnect my modem every time the phone rang, I might have had the emotional wherewithal to make the relationship work. It was all Bell’s fault. I wondered if failure to provide Internet service contributing to the breakdown of a relationship was grounds to sue. If this were America, I bet it would be.

Aside from impatient friends and irate editors, most people were sympathetic. They listened attentively and told me their own isp horror stories. None of us felt we could do anything about it. We were sheep, and corporations like Bell and Rogers were our masters.

That reminds me of a line I heard on the old hbo sitcom Dream On: the odious Australian boss, Gibby Fiske, taunts the beleaguered protagonist, Martin Tupper: “What’s wrong with you? You look rougher than a sheep’s arse on ‘Farmers Drink Free’ night.”

Do you get what I’m saying here?

We are at the mercy of monopolies like Bell and Rogers, and the promise of new technology to make our lives better is a lie. In fact, we are in a battle; technology is a tool of profit-mad corporations, and when Yahoo and Bell send little messages to us subscribers (“Welcome, ELLEN!”), it’s an insult because nobody there actually knows me, or cares. The technicians and other wage slaves who deal directly with us customers are nice (and God help them if they aren’t, because their calls are monitored by corporate-style Big Brothers), but ultimately there’s no accountability. There is the appearance of a civilized world, with the tool of technology at our fingertips, but it’s a sham. There is no order, no authority, no system. Chaos rules. This is why the world is in the state it’s in today. The war in Iraq is a direct result of the same kind of capitalistic, money-grubbing, worker-screwing, morally irresponsible, heartless greed that has led to my own isp failure-induced trauma.

I wonder if I’m turning into a crank. I remember reading an article by Peter Gzowski years ago about how he had just bought his first computer but then couldn’t make the printer work. He got out his old typewriter and copied the article off the screen so he could fax it to his editor. I thoroughly enjoyed that article, but my young self at the time also felt a congenial disdain for Gzowski’s old-fogey attitude toward new technology. I grouped him with all the other Luddites who were churning out peevish articles about how these newfangled “word processors” would inevitably lead to lazier writing.

And now I am the Peter Gzowski! I am the fogey who fears and loathes new technology! Soon I’ll be writing my own aging-hack articles, grumpily addressing such burning journalistic issues as: “Hey, do you know what the younger generation is doing? They’re typing ‘u2’ for ‘you, too’! Isn’t that wild?”

I really want to make another list here, because I don’t know how else to do justice to the fiasco that my relationship with Bell Sympatico degenerated into during the dying days of our association. But the editors here refuse to discuss the list thing anymore. And I do realize it’s pointless. But when one has been through a terrible experience, it’s so soothing to make a complete record of all the transgressions—the treachery, the injustice, the heartbreak of disconnection. Perhaps it’s a bid for control or a need to convey to you, whoever you are—to prove beyond any doubt—that none of this was my fault. Not that assigning blame is a useful exercise. It never is, of course. But just let me say this: I arranged bill payment through pre-authorized chequing-account withdrawals and Bell Sympatico never made the withdrawals, and then they threatened me with collection agencies and a bad credit rating; and then when I finally did get my Dell computer with Rogers cable access and phoned to cancel Sympatico, they said I couldn’t cancel anything until I called a different business office to cancel my digital bundle, even though I didn’t have a digital bundle because I don’t have a cellphone or Bell ExpressVu satellite service, and then they said I had to pay a cancellation charge(!), and finally, at the very end, they said they had no record of my ever having an account with them, so they had to start a new file and send it to “the department that handles special problems” and someone would call me back in a few days, but no one did. But then when I went on the Internet to check for any lingering emails, I found that they had cancelled it after all.