My love letter to my Internet Help Desk

My love letter to my Internet Help Desk

[Background: Last week, I spent 19 hours over five days dealing with the tech support call center from my Internet Service Provider (ISP) – all because I installed their software “security program” from one of their email offers, which mucked up my computer, making it completely inoperable.

Below is the actual enthusiastic letter of appreciation I sent to my ISP. Because I don’t wish to embarrass my ISP by name, I have chosen to alter the company’s actual name to protect its identity.

Everything written below is the 100% truth of my actual nightmare experience. Well, perhaps 90%. – tej]

Dear KOMKAST,

Can I just say, I AM YOUR BIGGEST FAN! Your commitment to keeping your customers satisfied has never been more on display than over the past five days. In that time I’ve gotten to know  many of your tech support team members so well, they almost feel like family to me now. I am writing to tell you how grateful I am for everything that you have done to restore my faith in large bureaucratic, monopolistic utility companies for which their customers are merely numbers on an income statement spreadsheet.

My original  plan for last Saturday had been to go on a nice long day hike with my family. Little did I know that at precisely 9:07am that morning KOMKAST was going to radically change my agenda for the next five days. What an educational experience it was. Can I share it with you?

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Why baseball is better than having sex…

Why baseball is better than having sex…

baseball -mascots2Oops. Seems I accidentally pressed the RETURN key on the Headline a bit too soon. My bad. What I meant to write was:

Why Baseball is better than having sextuplets.”

Frankly, do I really need to defend this position? I mean, seriously, who would rather parent six screaming babies than to go to the ballpark, watch a game, while scarfing down peanuts, a hot dog and a cold beer? Anybody?

I have loved baseball ever since I was a young child. I even named this humor blog View from the Bleachers in part as a nod to my favorite spectator sport. Baseball has long been called America’s pastime. The first baseball game was played way back in 1846. As any high school student today could tell you, that’s probably like maybe over 70 years ago.

Having grown up in Albany, NY, in the 1960s, listening on the radio in the 1960’s to the then dismal, cellar-dwelling New York Mets, I was hooked at an early age. I wanted to name our eldest daughter DiMaggio in honor of Joltin’ Joe. I tried to convince my wife her friends would call her Maggie, but I was overruled. So we named her Yastrzemski instead.

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Five strategies to take the worry out of saving for your kids’ college education

Five strategies to take the worry out of saving for your kids’ college education

About 18 years ago, my wife and I committed a horrible lapse of financial judgment. We are still paying for this reckless mistake these many years later: We became parents. At first it seemed like a great idea – staring into the innocent, helpless eyes of our two adorably sweet, tiny angel babies we adopted from China.

If only someone could have intervened – stopped me from boarding that plane for Hong Kong – and pointed out that over the next 17 years, these little angels would morph into retirement-savings-draining, eye-rolling, “take me to the mall now” moody, fashion-obsessed teenage drama queens who would eventually become legally permitted to drive my car and whose primary function on this planet appears to be texting their friends about how lame their parents were for not letting them go to a party simply because we don’t know the boy or his family… if only somebody had intervened back then and told me what we would be in for, I would have undoubtedly made … the same reckless decision. But that’s beside the point.

My point is this: Raising kids is expensive. The return on your college investment is highly speculative at best, particularly when you learn your son has decided to major in Medieval French Gender Studies. For many parents a far less risky investment would be to put down their entire life savings on the trifecta in the second race at Belmont Park.

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