The Comcast ClusterF*ck Continues Unabated

due to the unimaginable response from COMCAST -- after Fred's three phone "conversations," my three (transcripted) "chats" -- coupled with my profound sadness about what is happening (has been happening/will happen) in my beloved FRANCE -- the following email was sent to Fred, ensconced in the computer turret since early this morning, trying to decipher the terrorist training that COMCAST operator-operatives under go when becoming customer service representatives. the competition for sales commissions apparently justifies the lies upon lies that these COMCAST lying liars spout with such facility. i say again, and never often enough, "dear, wonderful, brilliant, sweet Fred!" say it with me, DEAR READERS, say it with me: "dear, wonderful, brilliant, sweet Fred!"

anyway, upon receiving our fifth email from COMCAST detailing what our new billing will be -- last promised, on the phone, to be a much boosted superheroic internet speed and 140 mind-numbing television channels at a locked-in rate of $89, only to be an actual $188.86 monthly bill... my aforementioned numb mind imploded. odd, because i usually EXplode my brain matter onto the ceiling, right next to the coffee splatters.  you know?

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pertinent, if incoherent, email to Fred, this friday morning, ce vendredi néfaste, maléfique::

we will prevail over The Evil Comcast Empire, without doubt. 

but... "j'accuse" * to quote a REAL quote from émile zola versus the misquoted voltaire! 

if they won't give us decent internet speed/power, won't budge on the cost (if you can get them to say the ACTUAL cost), then: 

**tell them we will budge on the television service.
"give us the best television price you can that will bring the total,.actual, complete cost below $100."
i will go into television withdrawal before i will pay these ridiculous "triple pay" prices for "double play" services that are really ground balls hit to the first baseman!   

**if lowering the television service does not bring the price down to what they have promised (in writing and on the phone), tell them we will keep the present crappy service."
at this point would you please ask them to purge the line to the turret router (remind them that it runs through the barn and over the rope ladder to the turret) -- and maybe that will at least clean up, and maybe speed up, my internet (since yours seems to be acceptable, if i understand correctly.  are you still able to stream video without interruption and glitches? load pages quickly? i can barely get through short youtube vids and it takes between 45 seconds and 8 HOURS (okay, 4 minutes, jeez) to load the stupid COMCAST page! but then, you have the luxurious computer turret, and i, i have the creepy suite in the outer northwest manor wing.

satiric trivia below, mon chéri, in honor of what's happening in FRANCE-- 

* beginning of zola's wonderful letter "j'accuse":

Me permettez-vous, dans ma gratitude pour le bienveillant accueil que vous m’avez fait un jour, d’avoir le souci de votre juste gloire et de vous dire que votre étoile, si heureuse jusqu’ici, est menacée de la plus honteuse, de la plus ineffaçable des taches ?

Vous êtes sorti sain et sauf des basses calomnies, vous avez conquis les cœurs. Vous apparaissez rayonnant dans l’apothéose de cette fête patriotique que l’alliance russe a été pour la France, et vous vous préparez à présider au solennel triomphe de notre Exposition Universelle, qui couronnera notre grand siècle de travail, de vérité et de liberté. Mais quelle tache de boue sur votre nom — j’allais dire sur votre règne — que cette abominable affaire Dreyfus ! Un conseil de guerre vient, par ordre, d’oser acquitter un Esterhazy, soufflet suprême à toute vérité, à toute justice. Et c’est fini, la France a sur la joue cette souillure, l’histoire écrira que c’est sous votre présidence qu’un tel crime social a pu être commis...

[....]  J’accuse le général de Pellieux et le commandant Ravary d’avoir fait une enquête scélérate, j’entends par là une enquête de la plus monstrueuse partialité, dont nous avons, dans le rapport du second, un impérissable monument de naïve audace.

J’accuse les trois experts en écritures, les sieurs Belhomme, Varinard et Couard, d’avoir fait des rapports mensongers et frauduleux, à moins qu’un examen médical ne les déclare atteints d’une maladie de la vue et du jugement.

translated, but you must imagine COMCAST personnel (the CEO plus the chat and telephone "customer service" lying liar experts) in place of the french president Félix Faure, General De Pellieux, commander Ravary, and the "experts" Belhomme, Varinard and Couard.  the "dreyfus affair" would become "the Comcast Clusterfuck." france, herself, would be the irreligious USAmerican Corporate Conglomerate, i guess!

Would you allow me, in my gratitude for the benevolent reception that you gave me one day, to draw the attention of your rightful glory and to tell you that your star, so happy until now, is threatened by the most shameful and most ineffaceable of blemishes?

You have passed healthy and safe through base calumnies; you have conquered hearts. You appear radiant in the apotheosis of this patriotic festival that the Russian alliance was for France, and you prepare to preside over the solemn triumph of our World Fair, which will crown our great century of work, truth and freedom. But what a spot of mud on your name—I was going to say on your reign—is this abominable Dreyfus affair! A council of war, under order, has just dared to acquit Esterhazy, a great blow to all truth, all justice. And it is finished, France has this stain on her cheek, History will write that it was under your presidency that such a social crime could be committed[....]

 I accuse General De Pellieux and commander Ravary of performing a rogue investigation, by which I mean an investigation of the most monstrous partiality, of which we have, in the report of the second, an imperishable monument of naive audacity.

I accuse the three handwriting experts, sirs Belhomme, Varinard and Couard, of submitting untrue and fraudulent reports, unless a medical examination declares them to be affected by a disease of sight and judgment.

END OF EMAIL TO FRED

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BEGINNING OF COMMENTARY ON FRANCE, AS THAT IS WHAT I AM OBSESSIVELY WATCHING ON COMCAST TELEVISION (despite our apparently nose-bleed inducing new rates!):


i MUST add: à bas Jean Marie et Marine Le Pen, aussi bien que le Front National.  Ça va sans le dire que nous condamnons l'extrémisme sous toutes les formes, y inclus les islamistes dit jihadistes --  faux et dégoûtants -- déguelasses -- qui m'ont fait vomir hier et encore une fois ce matin, mais ça, c'était pour la dernière fois, JAMAIS ENCORE...  (mais je suis incapable de ne rien dit, de cesser de parler, comme mon cher samuel beckett dit dessous...)

[ADDENDUM: these quotes of Beckett are part of the manifesto of my life, are my essential last will and testament, if i were to have a manifesto of my life and were my last will and testament not so redundant with the minutia of debts and investments and equity and gratitude.]

[i am close to another treatise on translation, as the Beckett quotes from his fiction were NOT translated by Beckett, when originating in the French, as he never did his own translating.  the French originals are much... truer, stronger?]

I pause to record that I feel in extraordinary form. Delirium perhaps.
SAMUEL BECKETT, Malone Dies
My mistakes are my life.
SAMUEL BECKETT, How It Is
Where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.
SAMUEL BECKETT, The Unnamable
There’s man all over for you, blaming on his boots the faults of his feet.
SAMUEL BECKETT, Waiting for Godot
In me there have always been two fools, among others, one asking nothing better than to stay where he is and the other imagining that life might be slightly less horrible a little further on.
SAMUEL BECKETT, Molloy
If by Godot I had meant God I would have said God, and not Godot.
SAMUEL BECKETT, The Essential Samuel Beckett: An Illustrated Biography
another story leave it dark no the same story not two stories leave it dark all the same like the rest a little darker a few words all the same a few old words like for the rest stop panting let it stop
SAMUEL BECKETT, How It Is
Ah, the old questions, the old answers, there's nothing like them!
SAMUEL BECKETT, Endgame
All this business of a labour to accomplish, before I can end, of words to say, a truth to recover, in order to say it, before I can end, of an imposed task, once known, long neglected, finally forgotten, to perform, before I can be done with speaking, done with listening, I invented it all, in the hope it would console me, help me to go on, allow me to think of myself as somewhere on a road, moving, between a beginning and an end, gaining ground, losing ground, getting lost, but somehow in the long run making headway.
SAMUEL BECKETT, The Unnamable
Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.
SAMUEL BECKETT, The Letters of Samuel Beckett
Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But it's always the same thing. Yes, it's like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don't laugh any more.
SAMUEL BECKETT, Endgame
Tears and laughter, they are so much Gaelic to me.
SAMUEL BECKETT, Molloy
Deplorable mania, when something happens, to inquire what.
SAMUEL BECKETT, The Unnamable
Yesterday is not a milestone that has been passed, but a daystone on the beaten track of the years, and irremediably part of us, within us, heavy and dangerous. We are not merely more weary because of yesterday, we are other, no longer what we were before the calamity of yesterday.
SAMUEL BECKETT, "Proust", Samuel Beckett: Poems, Short Fiction, and Criticism
He who has waited long enough, will wait forever. And there comes the hour when nothing more can happen and nobody more can come and all is ended but the waiting that knows itself in vain.
SAMUEL BECKETT, Malone Dies
in reality we are one and all from the unthinkable first to the no less unthinkable last glued together in a vast imbrication of flesh without breach or fissure
SAMUEL BECKETT, How It Is
My life, my life, now I speak of it as of something over, now as of a joke which still goes on, and it is neither, for at the same time it is over and it goes on, and is there any tense for that? Watch wound and buried by the watchmaker, before he died, whose ruined works will one day speak of God, to the worms.
SAMUEL BECKETT, Molloy
The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.
SAMUEL BECKETT, Endgame
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
SAMUEL BECKETT, Worstward Ho!
The fact is, it seems, that the most you can hope is to be a little less, in the end, the creature you were in the beginning, and the middle.
SAMUEL BECKETT, Molloy

(i must add, i cannot stop from adding, that i wish my gothic wonderland students had bothered to read, to really read, to think, to really think, the beckett i forced down leurs gueules de bois ... but no, they managed to decide, in an incident of mass hysteria, that en attendant godot was "about" homosexuality. no, i'm not kidding. those essays, taken with the berkeley student, a brilliant young man, who chose to write his first composition in the form of a suicide letter, were among the most horrific teaching moments of my career.)


© 2015 L. Ryan