My telecommunications Destiny!

Here I sit in my office chatting online with Destiny, who assures me that she will need "just one more moment" to resolve my problem. I suppose one more moment won't hurt since I've been chatting online for nearly 40 minutes already, first with Ricardo and then with Lynn and then with Destiny. None of them can tell me why we still lack functioning telephone service at home. The storm knocked out our service last Tuesday, a week ago tomorrow. While I appreciate the absence of robocalls in my life, it's a bit disconcerting to lack home phone service, especially since there's no cell-phone access at my house.

A 40-minute (and counting!) online chat sounds pretty intense, but very little of that time has been spent actually chatting. I've been subjected to "let me connect you with the repair department" twice and then sent into the limbo of the eternally spinning circle and a message telling me I was number 30 in the queue, then number 29, and then right on down to number 1, where I got kicked back to the beginning again and had to be reconnected.

But I'm not just sitting idly in my office watching the spinning circle of doom. I've been getting stuff done: paying bills, contacting the hotel we stayed at in North Carolina last month to ask why they haven't sent my husband's suit back even though I paid them for postage ("it's in the mail"), downloading my itinerary for my flight to San Francisco later in the week, sorting books, reading e-mails, checking on the spinning circle of doom again....I tell you, my life this morning is a thrill a minute. 

Now Destiny has come back with an answer: a repair person will be at my house today, and someone will need to be there to let them in, but she can't tell me when they will be there, and of course I couldn't have this little chat with Destiny at home because of the absence of connection, so it will take me at least 25 minutes to get there if I just abandon all the other errands I need to do in town today. And if I'm not there when the repair person arrives? "Then you will need to reschedule," says Destiny.

At what point do I just give up on having telephone service at home? (If Destiny knows the answer to that question, she's not telling.)