Captain's Log

I thought these people had been eliminated from our fine State!

Lady called in to complain becuase the "Family" version of The Fantastic Four wasn't tame enough.

See, with most new releases that are rated PG-13 we offer both the "Theatrical" version and the "Family" version, which has been toned down to a TV-PG. In other words, this is the movie as you would see it on the ABC Movie Of The Week in two years or so, only without the commercials. These movies are toned COMPLETELY down so that phrases such as "Go to Hell" and "Jesus CHRIST!" are reduced to "Go to Heck" and "Gosh!"

Watered down as it was, this woman was still very shocked and horrified that we considered this movie to be "Family Friendly". She had a list of grievances:

• The language was indeed toned down, but still quite harsh in nature
• Jessica Alba's outfit was too tight
• Too much hitting in general
• They showed the one boy even CATCHING ON FIRE!

They can only edit a movie so much before it becomes NOT THAT MOVIE! If we replace the boy who catches fire, then it's NOT THE FANTASTIC FOUR! They also can't shoot an alternate version of the film with Jessica Alba wearing a frumpy sweatsuit just to satisfy your prudish tastes! So here's my suggestion to keep from having a repeat of this situation in the future; have your husband gather up the children and take them down to the basement. You go grab the AM radio (the one alll the BAD stations filtered out so all you get is the God Channel and FOX News) and barricade yourselves because THE RAPTURE IS COMING! Wasn't one of the signs of the apocolypse "The Coming of The Harsh Language"?

Coming back from break, I passed three different reps on the phone helping customers set up Outlook Express.

I sat down and heard over the Cubicle wall both Kerri and T-Roy helping customers set up Outlook Express.

I signed in to my phone, and I instantly got a caller who needed help setting up Outlook Express.

Was there a meetign where all of you got together and said "So it's decided! Tuesday night, 11:37pm, we all call in and get help setting up Outlook Express! Syncronize watches on my mark... MARK."

Or is it just something in the water? A subliminal message? A combination of the two? Certain chemicals in the water supply combined with the flashing lights of the latest Old Navy commercial triggers the "MUST... USE... INFERIOR... MAIL-CLIENT SOFTWAAAAAARE!" command?

Whatever it was, it was CREEPY!

12:01AM: "I'm tellin' ya, I've had it hooked up before and I didn't need no stupid cable modem! I just screwed the coax directly in to the back of my computer and away I went! Yes, it was when I was with Comcast about 7 years ago! I know what I'm doing! Watch! I'll show you!"

(Customer puts down the phone and proceedes with 15 minutes of rustling around, swearing at cables, crashing and banging)

12:16PM "Where the hell does that cable screw in to the back of my computer? Did you guys flip a switch and make it go away?"

Here is a partial list of the things that people say on the phone when calling for tech support that really just put me in a foul frame of mind:

• "Yeah, I just have a quick question..."
  
• (in response to me saying "Thank you for calling Comcast, may I help you?) "*SIGH* Well I doubt you CAN help me."
  
• "Oh, and one more thing before I letcha go..." (usually repeated at least three times before the call is done)
  
• "Well it was working this morning"
  
• "I don't see why I should have to ________, I didn't even touch anything and it just stopped working!"
  
• "Well the LAST person I talked to helped me with my (insert unsupported issue or hardware), so why can't YOU?"
  
• "I already did that"

I feel like I'm in an old fashioned horror film tonight as each of my co-werkers violently falls victim to the deadliest of all killers, The Stupid Caller!

We all thought it would be great fun to drive out to the old abandoned cabin up in the mountains known as Comcast today. It'll be great! No adults to bug us as we drink, smoke pot, go skinny-dipping and have pre-marital sex! And of course we totaly ignored the warnings from the crazy old coot at the convenience store on the way up here, him and his stories about the 27 bodies they found in that cabin years ago and how they never found the killer.

So here we are in this lovely secluded mountain cabin of a call center when THE STUPID CALLER STRIKES! Not more than 2 cubicles away from me, I can hear the phone rep's death rattle: "What? No! Don't - don't click on the - okay, you clicked on it. Go ahead and close that and - NO! DON'T UNPLUG YOUR COMPUTER WHY ARE YOU UNPLUGGING YOUR COMPUTER?!?!"

Then, mere moments after that one The Stupid Caller strikes again! "No, see, we disconnected your cable because you haven't made a payment in over 3 months. No m'am we did NOT disconnect it because you are Black. We are not attempting to 'Keep You Down' in any way. No m'am I am fairly certain that Martin Luther King's 'I Have A Dream' speech had NOTHING to do with you getting to see 'Lost' tonight. Please... please stop yelling, m'am..."

One by one they've all fallen victim to the nefarious plots of The Stupid Caller. "No you can't pay your bill with Food Stamps"... "I'm fairly sure that your printer isn't going to have any effect on your internet connection"... "I'm sorry but you must have at least Windows 98 to get on the internet, your 486 running Win3.1 just isn't gonna cut it"...

I'm so scarred right now. I... I don't know where everyone else is! I'm running through the woods in my underwear and the trees seem to be closing in on me! This is it! i just KNOW that the next Stupid Caller is coming for ME!

We had an... unfortunate... meal tonight from the fine folks at Chef Boy-R-Dee. It was a complete meal that came in a box and all you had to do was put it together and pop it in the oven and you'd have a tasty casserole in no time at all!

And it only cost us $1.49 at Big Lots, "The Island of Misfit Toys" for everything from Furniture to Underpants. And what little boy would want to play with a Charlie-In-The-Box?

Aparently, Chef Boy-R-Dee was sick the day they were making up new boxed meals and let his slow cousin (Chef Boy-R-Tarded) do it for him. And the result?

"I LIKE BEEF-A-RONI ON BISCUITS, PLEASE!!! AND PUT CHEESE-WIZ ON 'EM!!!"

The customer called in, concerned because he had not been able to get on-line all day long. Early this morning his brand-new wireless router started smoking, went "Fzzt!" and then all the lights on it went out. Also, the "PC-Link" light on his cable modem went out. Despite the overwhelming evidence that suggested his router was kaput, I did the standard trouble-shooting anyways. Unplugged it, plugged it in to a different outlet, swapped out the cat5 cable, checked all connections... nothing.

I helped him bypass the router, hooking the modem directly to his computer. The PC-Link light came back on, he got on-line just fine, and this would normally be The End of our call.

"So... now that The Internet's working again, can you help me hook my router back up?"

I bemusedly explained to him that the smoke/all lights off/"FZZT!" combo isn't really a normal procedure for a router to go through and that it was dead.

This confused the customer, mainly because he had "...Just BOUGHT this Router like three DAYS ago!"

I explained Entropy, Chaos Theory, Life & Death, The Changing Of The Seasons, Cost-Effectiveness of Cheap Overseas Labor and anything else that came to mind regarding why the router might not be working right now even though "It was working yesterday just fine". I used simple, easy-to-understand words and terms, leaving phoenetical pauses where I beleived he might wish to interject with any questions. There should have been no question by the end of my lecture as to why Mr. Router had to take the big dirt nap.

"Well, yeah... but can we just *try* it again and see if it works now?"

Well sir... you can *try* to get back on a dead horse as many times as you like, but you ain't gonna get anywhere and you'll just end up smelling like a dead horse.