Columns Columns Jeanne Chaussee Vacation
Vacation
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- Published on Friday, 05 April 2013 13:02
- Written by Jeanne Chaussee
A string of seven days to do nothing but relax and enjoy mindless television is rare for anyone in the newspaper business – at last it came during Holy Week.
All set to turn on the string of mediocre and cheaply produced reality shows, I plunked down on the couch with drinks and snacks, flipped on the idiot box and found that the cable was not working. This always makes me really cranky.
Several calls later I get the story. You know, the one about how they are “putting in new lines” (that’s what they said last week when the cable was out).
“We promise it will be done by 8 p.m.”
At 9 a.m. the next day, still no cable. This time they are “putting in a new transformer” but we’ll have cable “late this afternoon.”
By the third day, they really couldn’t say what happened but we’d surely have cable by the end of the day. We did, just in time for some idiot to run into a pole and screw the whole thing up again. Finally, after lousing up three days of my precious seven, everything is up and running. For 24 hours I can watch all the trash I can stomach and it’s just as well. The electricity is out. It’s clearly a neighborhood thing. Calls to CFE let us know that we are not yet on the work list but by tonight it should be back on.
Okay, now four days of my allotted seven are ruined. Nothing to do but take the intelligent way out – play Yahtzee by candlelight. At least I know that the sound of the dice rattling in the cup will make the neighbors nuts.