There’s something to be said about hopping in you car..er,uh…van (now that the wife totaled out the Camry), drop a cool $400 in gas (used to be $53.00) and head for Maine, from Florida. Not everyone has a camp nestled in the woods (well, sort of) of rural Maine, where they can “get away from it all”! Now what that something that can be said is, I haven’t a clue.
I will tell you this, though. Living in a world where we have come to expect instant everything, it hasn’t been an enjoyable experience trying to get connected to the Internet. One of those other things that need to be said is living in the sticks doesn’t give a happy camper many options when it comes to getting “connected”. Only one Internet service provider and my choices are dial-up or DSL.
Of course I opted for DSL – I had it while I was here last year. No problems really! I could say my choices were slow and oh my god, but now that I’m connected, I’m actually faster here than I am in Florida – my Internet connection that is. Nothing can really make me faster. As it is now you have to sight by the fence post at the end of the drive to see if I’m actually moving.
Where was I? Oh, yeah! Back in the sticks of Maine. Being a smart “city boy” (actually a transplant, as I grew up and spent most of my years, so far, in Maine.) I called ahead so that I wouldn’t have to wait to get online. I placed the call and told them when I would be arriving, etc. I asked if I could come into the business office on Monday morning and pick up my modem, sign the agreement and get online? Ayuh, was pretty much the response. (That’s Maine-speak for, “Well, Mr. Remington. We cannot schedule the time to connect your service until AFTER you have signed the agreement but I’m from Maine and I don’t offer any unnecessary words unless specifically asked.)
I entered the office only minutes after they opened with my day already precisely planned out. First, make the 30-mile trip from the sticks to the not-so-far-out-in-the-sticks telephone office, once again spending far too much money for gas. (God we need to get drilling!) Then, pick up my modem, sign the agreement, go to Wal-Mart and buy provisions (you don’t make a lot of trips these days), head back to camp and stop in to check on embroidery stuff and then plug in the modem and get to work. This way, most of you wouldn’t even know that I was gone.
Once I entered the telephone office, I could smell disappointment in the air. It’s sort of like going in the dentist’s office knowing someone’s going to attack you and try drilling holes in your head.
I happily signed my agreement and I was actually quite pleasant with the clerk. She fumbled for several minutes trying to insert the tab on the modem box into the appropriate slots only to discover that once releasing them the tabs and lid would pop open. I’m not sure how many times someone has to insert and reinsert before they figure out it won’t stay. Another story I guess.
I grabbed by modem box and turned to walk away. I stopped and looked back at the clerk who was looking at me with one of those, “Ha, ha! Another one who thinks he’s going to run home and get online immediately!”
I said, “I can go home and hook this thing up and get to work, right?”
“I’m checking right now, Mr. Remington,” she said.
I felt gas roll around inside my stomach and then slowly make its way into my duodenum, my large and small intestines and finally pressing hard to bust out of my widely-spread backside that I had been sitting on while driving for 30 hours.
“You are scheduled to be connected on Wednesday morning, Mr. Remington,” she said as she wrinkled her nose, somehow knowing I was fighting back a nasty explosion.
“Now, just a minute!” I said. “I called ahead from Florida so that I wouldn’t have to wait to be connected. I have a job. I have to get online. People depend on me!”
My pleas fell on deaf ears and I know the reason she works where she does is because she likes causing people like me to get worked up and make uncomfortable bodily emissions.
“Well, we can’t really schedule you a time for connection until after you have signed the agreement.” she said with a sense of total control over a helpless “city boy”.
“Whatever!” and out the door I ran only because I had to relieve myself. If I was any kind of man I would have let her have it before I went outside but sometimes these things can backfire.
I collected myself and headed home, taking the 35-minute drive to convince myself I didn’t need to get to work right away. After all, my wife and I were leaving the next morning to drive another 3 hours to Bangor to see my son and his family.
There’s another thing to be said about being in the “country” but once again, I am at a loss for clean words to be able to say those words. Six hours round trip and many dollars in gas later, I returned last night around midnight. I remembered my granddaughter had left one of those Barbie Doll twirling batons in camp last year. I knew it had two different sized rubber caps on each end. I figured one of those would fit so that I could drive my eyeballs back into my head. Of the three hours, one hour wasn’t bad, the second hour I drove through dense fog in the dark, while my wife snored in the seat beside me. The third hour was heavy rain and lightning, mixed with more fog for good measure.
Once in camp, I was anxious to fire up the computer because I just knew that because I didn’t fart in the telephone office lobby, they were going to do me a favor and get me hooked up on Tuesday and not wait for Wednesday. I went to bed instead.
Morning light comes early in Maine. If you’ve not spent any time here, it really begins breaking daylight between 3:30 and 4:00 a.m. First though, in all my excitement, I had to pull the side panel off my computer and install some much-needed RAM. I doubled my capacity, fired up the dusty old box of digital hemorrhoid creators and soon discovered I still wasn’t connected yet.
All morning I checked every 15 or 20 seconds and by 11:00 I couldn’t take it anymore. I ran to the front door and yelled at my wife, “I’m mad as hell and I ain’t going to take it any longer!” (That’s an original line, right?)
Emboldened by my frightening of innocent little birds flitting about the area woods, I turned abruptly and picked up the phone just so I could call the “Technical Support Staff” and chew them out, all the while being put on hold for a good 20 minutes.
I finally reached a technician and trust me I am using that term lightly. “I’m sorry, Mr. Remington. We had so many electrical storms near where you live that everyone is busy trying to restore service. We hope to have you connected this afternoon.”
*%&#$^*
It’s now 4:15 p.m. and my phone rings. “Mr. Remington?” I heard.
“”Ayuh!”, I replied. I am in Maine now so they understand that Maine talk.
“Your service has been done but there doesn’t seem to be any communicating going on with your modem and our equipment,” Amanda says.
Then began with the list of things that I might have in my “camp” that could be causing the “interference” – numerous phones?, fax machine?, nope! satellite dish? Ha! The list went on for quite some time when I finally broke in and said, “I can make this real easy for you. This is my camp. I have one phone line in from outside to one phone jack. At that jack I have a splitter where one six-foot phone line goes to your modem and the other to this one phone I am talking to you on. There is nothing else in camp. I do have a 12-inch portable television that I can get one station on if I can get my wife to stand on her head in the corner on partly cloudy days, the temperature above 60 degrees and the wind out of the southwest!”
It was all my fault. Through all of that, we discovered that my lousy splitter I bought last year at Wal-Mart created too much “noise” so the modem wouldn’t “sync” with the telephone company equipment. It worked fine last year. So, I unplugged the phone, which I was happy to do, and plugged in only the modem line and it was like Barack Obama had walked in the room. The skies opened and I began feeling like everything was going to be good, even that manure would somehow taste good.
I was so moved and spiritually uplifted that I felt I needed to take the first moments of being online to share my experiences with you.
Your welcome!
Now, my schedule. Tomorrow I will leave here late morning – yeah, I know. More gas! – pick up Milt and head for Kittery, Maine, another 3-hour drive. Does it seem like anytime you want to go somewhere while in Maine, it is a 3-hour drive?
I will be streaming live audio and video of the Maine Moose Lottery drawing that will be held at the Kittery Trading Post. I hope you’ll tune in. Tomorrow, if you return to the home page at Black Bear Blog and Skinny Moose Media, I’ll have links you can click on to go view and listen.
I’ll be online around 3 p.m. and doing all sorts of things including some interviews, etc. At 6 p.m., when the drawing of names begins, I will just be streaming the audio and video so you can listen for your name to be drawn without interruption from me.
I’ll be home around midnight and back online Friday morning! See you then.
Tom Remington
