“Hey, dude!”
“Dude?”
“Your internet real slow?”
“Yeah. I told you not to put all those damned commercial widgets on your Payperblaug page. Now look what you’ve done!”
“Dude, if I’m that powerful, how come I ain’t sending you out for coffee?”
“Because, dude, the richest Payperblauger in the world can’t afford a cup of coffee. Never mind the flunky to get it for you.”
“Of course I can’t make any money if the internet’s crashed and no one can see my posts! What are we going to do, dude?”
“Besides reaping the thanks of a grateful world for your silence? How about checking the ISP’s status page?”
“Y’mean, we can?”
“For the moment anyway. Here goes … oh, man, dude! Get a load of this.”
“That sounds odd.”
“Odd?!? Dammit, dude, there’s a hole in this bucket. You get your internet from the cable company. When the cable goes out, you’re supposed to use the Internet to check out the status of the cable service. But you don’t have the cable, so you can’t use the cable to access the internet to figure out what happened to the cable!”
“Oh wow, dude. Who thinks up this stuff?”
“The same people who think that the kids of Hawai‘i are so much smarter than everyplace else that, unlike everyplace else, they can afford to lop seventeen days off the school year.”
“Y’mean, like the kids that can’t divide 10 by 10 and come up with 1?”
“They weren’t kids. But, yeah, them.”
PS: Do not read the comments on the newspaper article, linked to above, that details the teacher-furlough plan for the public schools in Hawai‘i. If you’re like me, they’ll make you wish to give the state back to the Hawai‘ian monarchy, and good riddance to bad rubbish.
– O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.
Well honey, the cable company probably isn’t too worried about their customers being able to read that page since Hawaii schools earn (? seems like the wrong verb) some of the lowest competency test scores in the nation.
And their teachers earn the lowest pay in the United States (in terms of puf purchasing power) – before the furloughs. The response by many of our fellow Hawai‘ian citizens? Privathools. Which pay their teachers even less than the publics, and cherrypick their students. In my mind, a place that will tolerate, never mind promote, such a situation deserves to regress into a community of royals and serfs.
I swear we’re on the same island, in alternate universes.
I just stopped in from blogging about an upcoming rally in which I mentioned our Tanaiste who recently talked about Einstein’s Theory of Evolution in one of her public speeches.
THIS is a product of Irish education, and what have they been doing all year? — cutting funds to Irish education of course. I could go on and on about it, but there’s my blood pressure to worry about.
And yes, same thing here with our internet company: the “help” page is online! Dumb, or too clever? Grr.
Einstein’s Theory of Evolution, huh? From your Deputy Prime Minister? She related to Dan Quayle, by any chance? (Mind you, Quayle wouldn’t have had the wit, or the gumption, to publicly lambaste his own Government’s key budget document, as Coughlin has.)
I suppose you could argue that cutting education is OK, based on the evidence of our avocado shoppers and your Tanaiste, because look what the current outlays are giving us, and why keep throwing good money after bad? I’m sure the English lords of Ireland felt this way about educating the peasantry …
One question, and this may be a dumb one, but it needs to be asked. Doesn’t your Cable Company have a Telephone Number you can call when this happens?
Let me guess they made you get your telephone service through your cable as well so you wouldn’t be able to bother some little Gherkin on the other end when things like this happen.
Bill, they do. But good luck finding it. And yes, people who get the phone/internet/television cable packages don’t get to make phone calls either when the cable dies. But anyone with a cell phone has an option. There aren’t very many ISP options in Hawai‘i …
LOL! @ Bill!
Sounds like a Catch 44 to me!
Or an industrial disease, Melli?
Great blog. You crack me up, as Quilly always does. I should get my daughter to read this, as she is chairman of the math dept at a public high school in Honolulu. Her husband is a teacher at an elementary school in Kailua. And, yes, they get no respect.
Thanks, Gigi, and greetings and best wishes to your daughter and her SO. With all the issues that teachers have to face, here and elsewhere, I admire their courage and tenacity.