rah rah sis boom bah

a couple of months ago, when we were still in the honeymoon stage with the
people whose internet we were secretly siphoning, i loudly proclaimed that
"i shall never pay for internet ever again" and that anyone who does is a
straight up "sucker". well, the people whose internet we were using
somehow caught on or moved or something and now we can't access any free
internet in our apartment. not "internet", not "dlink", not even "Ellis
Family Network". bullshit!

so we tried to go without internet for a while. i found that if i went on
our front porch, sat on the stairs, and sort of leaned over, i could get
the university's wireless signal. but, there are some points of the day
when it is just downright embarassing that i'm still wearing pajamas, and
i was afraid someone i knew would walk by. or, what if it rained and i
needed to send an emergency email?

so we did that for a couple of weeks. finally i broke down. i need the
internet. why? so i can "work from home" (in other words, not be
completely out of contact when i skip out of going in to the office). you
know, and blogs. i need to check mah blogs.

i called att the other day to get the whole shebang set up. first they
wanna give me the 80 dollar package with the caller id and all that crap.
i had to basically keep repeating "i dont need that, not using a phone"
"we are not even going to hook up a phone" etc. finally i got it down to
10 bucks a month for the phone line and 20 bucks for the internet. pretty
cheap split between three people so whatevs. "do you need any of the
hardware to set up?" "oh no we already have that from the last time we had
internet". saved 70 bucks on that.

i spent the entire weekend tearing this apartment apart looking for that
goddamned modem. seriously, the internet was on starting on friday and i
couldn't even use it because i couldn't find the modem that i knew we had
just about 8 months ago when we moved here. i opened every box, looked in
every closet, lifted up every piece of crap to look under it in this
entire apartment.

it got to the point where I had looked everywhere except in the closet in
our bedroom. i told mike "it must be in there", because seriously i swept
this place. he said when he got home from work he would help me find it.

when he got home from work, i took a chair over and started getting into
the closet. mike said "maybe we should just buy a new one". i said "are
you crazy, haven't you ever lost anything, we'll find it". he said "well
it's probably outdated anyway." i said "no we just used it, it's the same
thing they would have sent us".

finally, after i started pulling crap out of the top of the closet, mike
said "stop looking". and i was like "no we're gonna find it, get over here
and grab this bag full of hats". and then he said "no raedy, seriously.
stop looking. please."

i came down off my chair, really confused...that's when he fessed up.
apparently a couple of months ago when i was shit talking the internet, he
decided to THROW AWAY THE MODEM. this man has 8 bags of old walgreens
receipts, shiny glass, 700 jackets, everything. EVERYTHING he has ever
touched, he saves. but a piece of electronic equipment that we might some
day use and if not could at least sell or give away to a friend?

trashed.

and not only that, but he didn't even tell me. he thought he could get a
new modem, hide it somewhere and have me discover it. like a five year old
whose hamster died. the funny thing is, i memorized the serial number on
the bottom of that modem because it was the password. 5487067712. i would
have known that was not my modem. so he was spending several days
feverishly calling computer stores, trying to get a modem while i trashed
our entire apartment looking for it.

i gave him 24 hours to produce a working modem or else.

luckily for him he did.

*story retold with mike's permission.