Tag Archives: Verizon

Jack does NOT look like Statler OR Waldorf…. no, really……

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Jack’s weekly guest blog

We switched from a reliable but slow Verizon phone and internet service to a fast but unknown Comcast service a few months ago. When it works it’s great, but this morning seriously tested my forgiving Quakerish tendencies!

Starting with a phone call from our good friend Jennifer Cutting and leader of The Ocean Band (one of the headliners at Big Stone Celtic in a few weeks) which ended up being carried on over 5 interrupted calls. Then a long standing customer came in to make various orders on-line with ABE Books and that turned into a long and much interrupted process as well !

The blasted router kept switching itself off and on again as if it had a bit-part in ‘The I.T. Crowd’ and causing serious delays in all our work. Of course people phone in orders and reservations to The Second Story Cafe and almost certainly Kelley had as many problems as me.

But I can remember when my family in Scotland were unusual in having a phone at all and no-one except a science fiction writer would have imagined the Internet. Now here we are and we have become dependent on technology. It’s mostly technology we don’t understand and can’t repair – I can also remember when you didn’t have to plug your car into a computer to find out what was wrong with it.

Maybe I’m just an old curmudgeon! Or maybe these two muppets had it right!

Statler and Waldorf discover computers

Oliver and JackHey wait, how did that picture get there? We don’t look anything like Statler and Waldorf……

 

“Of Course You Are”

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As it is sometimes wont to do, our phone died at the bookshop. We jiggled some wires and then called The Phone Company. They dispatched someone. He arrived 37 hours after they promised he would.

A nice guy, “Steve” smiled at us, jiggled something, went outside, came back and jiggled something again, then said, “Fixed.”

And it was. Steve asked to wash his hands (whatever he’d jiggled was dusty) and be pointed to Peter Straub.

“You like horror?” asked my husband, leading him through the maze that used to be our kitchen, and is now an intricate system of one-way tunnels walled by books.

“I am the author of a horror novel,” said Steve, hauling a card from his shirt pocket and handing it to Jack. “Self-published my first this month! It’s 99 cents on Amazon this weekend if you download it to Kindle.” He then bought four Straubs.

So now we have several spaces in our horror shelf inventory, someone to lead this October’s adult scary stories night, and a phone that works. Hey ho, just another day in the bookshop.

Don’t forget to enter Caption Contest V! You can see the picture by scrolling down to yesterday’s blog; leave your caption entry under “Comments.” First prize is a free copy of ‘The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap.’