Service With A Scowl

The other day at work I was reading a post on one of the comics blogs I frequent, and in the comments someone mentioned an old Silver Age Superman story in which there is a very disturbing scene featuring Superman tenderly holding Supergirl’s chin and explaining to her that he can’t marry her because she’s his cousin, but that if she weren’t his cousin he would marry her, and he wishes that he could meet someone just like her who isn’t his cousin so that he could marry her.
(Update: see the actual panel here, thanks to Scipio over at The Absorbascon. Note Supergirl’s expression: frightened and kind of skeeved out, yet oddly titillated.)
I’m sure that when it was written it seemed innocent and harmless, but in this much more cynical and jaded time it just seems creepy.
Naturally I shared this with Scott and a discussion ensued in which the seed of an idea for a parody cover was planted in my mind.
Here’s what it grew into:




If I were more skilled as an artist – and a lot less lazy – I might have included a shot of Krypto in the background, covering his head with his paws in shame and embarrassment over what he’d seen going down in the Fortress of Solitude.
On the topic of irritating dogs, I was on my way back from dropping something in the mail when I was stopped by an older woman walking a dog.
Turns out she’s my downstairs neighbor and the owner of stupid new dog. She’s aware that the little piece of shit starts barking as soon as she leaves and wanted to apologize for it.
I did my best to be gracious and downplay just how irritating it is, but while it’s nice that she’s aware and is apologetic, that doesn’t keep me from wishing her dog would spontaneously combust, so the whole exchange was a little awkward.
I did make a comment about how I’m sandwiched in between two barking dogs, and she had the temerity to complain about stupid old dog being worse than hers.
Beyond receiving a pointless apology from the owner of the stupid new dog, I went out this morning and stopped at the barbershop to get a kicky new summer do, then did my grocery shopping. After paying for my groceries I went to the service desk to buy some stamps. The women working there saw that I was coming, so naturally she walked away.
When she came back, she made a show of ignoring me, before finally acknowledging my presence. I asked for the stamps (politely), and then handed her a twenty to pay for them, which she then dramatically held up to the light to examine in order to ensure that it wasn’t counterfeit, grudgingly accepted it, gave me my change, then my receipt, and then, finally, grunted, “Here,” and gave me the stamps. Even though she didn’t say it, I very clearly understood that it was her hope that I choke on the stamps.
Not sure what was up with that. I mean, I hated having to deal in customer service too, but on my worst day I was never anywhere near that rude to anyone, and it’s not like I was unpleasant or demanding.
Oh well.
Lousy customer service continued once I got home, though. A while back, my already slow Internet connection became 75% slower. I’d hoped it was a temporary glitch, but it hasn’t gotten better. Today, as the channel that’s supposed to be TLC suddenly became the Dish Network information channel, I decided to call in to complain. They said they’d send a technician out for the TLC problem, then transferred me to technical support for the Internet issue, where I was informed that my account is and always has been set at 256 Kbps, despite the fact that for over a year I was getting 1 Mbps. The technical support guy wouldn’t come out and say it, but the implication in his tone was that I’m an idiot who doesn’t know what he’s talking about and that I was only imagining that I ever got faster speeds than I’m getting now and that it’s perfectly reasonable to pay $33 a month for 256 Kbps when I could get 768 Kbps DSL from Verizon for $14.95. He said that I needed to talk to someone else to get my account changed to get faster speeds.
So I talked to someone else who explained that the speeds offered have always been – get this – 256 Kbps down and 1 Mbps up.
Excuse me? I explained to her that such a set up makes no sense whatsoever and that she must have it backwards because no company in anything approximating its right mind would offer that kind of speed set up because what people care about is fast downloads, not fast uploads.
(I didn’t bother pointing out that, for the record, I’m not getting anywhere near 1 Mbps up either, so I’m getting hosed anyway, even if that is how it’s set up, nor did I point out that everyone else I spoke to, the moment I complained about my speeds, jumped in and said, “We only offer 1 Mbps down.”)
She said that she saw that I was already set to have a technician come out tomorrow and that she would add the fact that I had complaints about my connection speeds to the dispatch notes.
Hopefully the technician won’t be a complete idiot and won’t think that I’m an idiot who wouldn’t be able to notice the difference when my connection speed drops by 75% and am not someone inclined to hallucinate and who therefore imagined that I was ever getting faster connection speeds than I am now.
In any case, that was today’s excitement, and now I need to stop trying to do anything online so that I can finish downloading a large file with my blazingly fast connection.