Things I already knew, but have recently reconfirmed:
-- That, at any given time, my clothing (including the contents of my pockets) weighs about six pounds.
-- That the words eerie and Erie appear in more crossword puzzles than any other two homophones.
-- That “Roget’s 21st Century Thesaurus in Dictionary Form” (1992, Kipfer, ed.) is the most useful book on my shelf.
-- That I actively seek alternatives to the job of taking a seat at my desk and writing, especially columns like this one, where I really didn’t have much to say when I sat.
-- That there is nothing to be gained by my retaining possession and ownership of the book “King of the Cowboys,” even though it is a first printing autographed by the author, Jim Dent – or these other 17 books that haven’t been touched in years.
-- That, as cool as getting up at 5:17 on May 17 (5/17) sounds – from a standpoint of time management, productivity, or simply getting the paper read from cover to cover before an early tee time – I’d still rather sleep until 7:30.
-- That the benefits of a 7:30 tee time are vastly overrated.
-- That I am probably not going to understand, ever, how the world evolved to a point where I pay a huge sum of money per month for a combination of internet and TV service and, when it goes out completely (“Broadband service not available” displayed on the computer screen and an incomprehensible menu of questions displayed on the TV, each ending with “Call the Help Desk”), I call the provider’s customer service number, wade through an electronic menu-driven answering system for 5 minutes, wait another 15 minutes to speak to a human being, who is in Costa Rica and immediately starts calling me Victor at the rate of five times per minute – way more than any friend, relative, or acquaintance would do – and I am on the phone with this person for 30 minutes, while every issue that can be remotely assessed is determined to be exactly as I reported them to be, after she has said three times, “I am going to reboot, this will take two minutes,” and she finally declares the matter to be such that I need to have a technician come to my home to assess the situation in person at the earliest possible time, with the not-yet-end result being that, on a major college football Saturday, I am told that said technician will arrive between 8:30 and 9:30 Sunday morning; and said technician calls at 8:29 a.m. Sunday to advise that he will be 30 minutes late, arrives at 10, and, within five minutes, determines that the cause of my misfortune is that one of his coworkers “doing an install or repair” the day before had accessed a neighborhood “box” of broadband circuits (or whatever they are called) and accidentally pulled the plug, literally, on my system.
-- That when the Internet service provider’s technician who has just fixed my Internet service – in five minutes, no less – says to me, “Let me give you my cell phone number, so that in the future you can avoid having to call the help desk in Costa Rica,” I should add such person to my contact list.
-- That when the internet service provider’s customer service rep in Costa Rica told me that, because this was not my fault, she was going to issue a $10 credit on my account for the loss of service Saturday and Sunday, … well, actually, this is not something that I already knew.