Baboon Pirates

Scribbles and Scrawls from an unrepentant swashbuckling primate.

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Location: Texas, United States

Wednesday, August 24, 2005

Heat To Boiling, Add Lots Of Tabasco

Lower Heat Occasionally, Simmer for 37 Years

I want to be calm. I really do. I realize that being in a constant state of PISSED OFF!!!!! does my blood pressure no good, and that sooner or later I'm gonna have the top of my skull pull a Mount St. Helens and scatter brain tissue over a 5 county area.

The things that I think would seriously annoy me don't seem to matter that much. I backed the Caddy into a pole fence a while back, tearing up the rear quarter panel, and while I was angry, it was my own fault for not watching where I was going. When the cat knocked over a full glass of iced tea, there's no use nailing her hide to a wall, it's not like she meant for it to land on the Sunday newspaper. Well, maybe she did...

It's where people do stupid shit that I just start to fume, and just can't let it go. It makes it worse when they're people that you interact with on a daily basis.

Case in point... I share a housing arrangement where everyone contributes an equal share in the bills. The mortgage, taxes, power, gas, water, etc. were all averaged over a 24 month period, and adjusted for rising rates. Then, everything got sliced up into equal shares, along with the split of the non-fluctuating bills, like cable ISP, satellite TV, phones, yard service and so on. It comes to a fairly sizable chunk of change, but split equally amongst the tenants, and with half of my total monthly amount payable out of my bimonthly paycheck, it's manageable. I pays my rent, I gets my share of the rewards, no big deal. The Grand Poobah of Bill Paying takes care of getting the payments made to the various vendors of services, and I don't have to deal with it. Fair deal all around, right?

Wrong. The Grand Poobah of Bill Paying keeps fucking up. I get home two nights ago, and the cable modem is dead. No signal. No playee on the Internets for El Capitan. The call Monday night to Roadrunner revealed a local outage. OK, annoying, but it happens.

The call last night when the problem still wasn't resolved revealed the outage was still there, only it wasn't a break in the wire, it was a break in the payments. Bill is 67 days past due. SIXTY SEVEN DAYS!! Holy Farookin' Fershizzle, Batman! Watch my head asplode!

This is not the first time this has occured. In recent memory, the power's been cut twice, the satellite service twice, and the water once due to "delays" in getting the check to the mailbox.

It's not a lack of funds, I know that for certain. We're all solvent, and there have been no financial emergencies that would divert the funds. Nope, this is a mixture of laziness and an ingrained need by the Grand Poobah of Bill Paying to "game" the system, and try to go as long as possible without getting the service cut. The last time the power got cut off, and I had to spend the night sweating in a 90 degree house, we had a serious discussion about the removal of vital bodily organs if this crap continued. Obviously, my words have had little effect.

What really sucks is that I can't even make the payment myself until I get paid on Friday, so it looks like a week of no ISP service at home for El Capitan.

I feel a revolutionary coup arising... there might just be a plot to overthrow the Grand Poobah of Bill Paying in favor of someone a bit more timely. I really hate paying bills, but I hate sitting in the dark even more.