My internet crashed last night, disrupting my plans to talk to my girlfriend on Skype this morning from ChinaFort1. Email #1 was me apologizing for the disruption. Email #2 was me telling her about how, in the face of mandatory achievement awards for finishing classes despite academic accomplishments, I gave a student a perfectly reasonably award laden with hard-to-detect innuendo about his future as a bachelor. Here's number three, written while the glow of the resumption of home broadband access washed over my ecstatic face (and please note that the moniker "Boo-boo" is for variety of pet names ONLY, and should not assumed to be my normal greeting protocol in any non-randomized situation):
I can normally deal with internet outages if I know they're coming, like when I go on vacation without my computer, or when I see a plain white van across the street occupied by men in black suits eyeing me through binoculars, all while nonchalant, orange-helmeted linemen clip the wires heading to my house. That's when I usually put in the earplugs (even though I always come out with my hands up, I hate bullhorns; they make me panicky).
In America if the internet goes out I'm on the phone with Comcast within thirty seconds demanding status updates, assuring them that yes, I've restarted my computer, my router and my modem in all applicable combinations and would they just freaking get the green lights blinking again? It's different here in China. Sure, there's a phone number I can call, and through the combination of pressing random numbers and pounding the phone on my head I can usually get someone on the line to yell at, but at that point, my terse demanding tone is exactly that, only it's in a language that's mostly foreign to the operator unless, especially as the situation escalates, he or she was an English major and had attended a graduate-level course in "The Art of Swearing, Level 2: Fuck You Fucking Motherfuckers."
