Because you're doing that, a few days in advance of moving you call your Internet and phone provider (who shall remain anonymous, but whose name might partially sound like something you do when you're fishing) and setup a disconnect of your service the day after you need it. After all, you're going to be in crazy mode for a few days in a row, and the internet and a phone will help deal with surprises and thus keep you sane, right?
Your service rep is very nice and sets it all up just fine. Disconnect is set for Friday, since the moving truck takes all your stuff on Thursday. The call goes so well - almost no time on hold even - that you are lulled into a false sense of security.
So Tuesday arrives, and at about 12:30 pm, just like you didn't schedule it, your internet and phone go away. Poof.
So you call your COMunications (and fishing related) service provider and get into their automated system, which helpfully sends a reset command to your equipment and tells you to wait ten minutes to see if that worked.
But you're smarter than that, so you push deeper into the phone tree saying "Representative!" until you are hoarse and eventually (after three hours and a light snack) get to a "Live Body" (tm) who might be able to look at your account and figure out why it's stopped working three days early.
The "Live Body" (tm) eventually isn't sure but it was probably someone who didn't read the date right on the disconnect request and just did it. They are escalating to the service rep that setup the disconnect and that person's boss...
[[Here we have to make a slight digression...]]
You know how calls like this go. They always take longer than you expect, and you might as well sit down while it is going on.
And (at least in our case, though possibly not yours) the cellular phone service at your home isn't exactly stellar, so you need to step outside to make this call, where the walls and some air won't interfere with the tenuous cell reception you get from an antenna powered by three geriatric squirrels running in wheels in a cage some 18 miles to the east.
So you're standing outside and as realize you should sit down for this conversation. Happily, you have a deck and some chairs and even a table you might put your feet up on while you wait through this.
[[Here we return you to the original narrative, but you have no idea where this is going.]]
So you pull out a chair, sit down, and just as the "Live Body" (tm) is starting to explain that he's escalating this ticket to someone, your left elbow hurts. A lot. And then your right elbow. And then you realize that there are rather a lot of flying, stinging things around you. Quite a lot of them, in fact.
You leap up - as one does - saying a lot of four letter words - as one does - that almost certainly surprise the snot out of the "Live Body" (tm) - as they can - and eventually get far enough away to be sure that you're not being chased by a horde of angry, stinging things. But what things?
Wasps, as it turns out.
Once you finish the call from a safe distance, and are assured the internet and phone will be restored within one - two at the outside - hours, and drive to the local store to purchase the needed "Horrific Chemicals" (tm), use them, and retreat again for a while, you eventually turn the table over and find this:
Yes, that's the "Trump Nest" (tm) , created sometime in the last three or four weeks by a group of rather unpleasant freeloaders living on your property without paying rent. And stinging you for disturbing them besides.
Anyway, that evening, when the stinging nasties that weren't in the nest when you nuked it from space are trying to figure out what to do with rest of their lives - ideally somewhere in Siberia - you scrap that nest off the underside of the table, hose off all the "Horrific Chemical" (tm) residue, and set about dealing with all the stuff that you put off while:
- Dealing with an Internet outage
- Being stung by insects that don't care about your Internet outage
- Exclaiming in pain/fear/frustration in the ear of the "Live Body" (tm) trying to fix the Internet outage
- Running from said stinging insects whilst teaching the "Live Body" (tm) some exiting new words
- Figuring out what sort of medical treatment you have for stings, since everything is already packed
- Mentally recovering from the stress induced by these two, entirely separate - but now horribly related - events
I'm sure something just like this happened the last time you were prepping to move. Right?
Oh, and it took 1.5 hours and another email - sent over those tenuous cellular radio waves - to get the Internet back.
