| Reset Sixteen, Day Fifty-Seven |
[Feb. 3rd, 2021|07:21 am]
rejectomorph
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My hope for a more or less normal day Tuesday went wrong early, when I got another phone call that got my brain active after only four hours of sleep. I tried getting back to sleep for about an hour but gave up and started my day bleary eyed by eleven o'clock. But the real disruption came later in the afternoon. A salesman— salesman!*mdash' came to the door. At first it was not clear that he was salesman, as his patter was odd and oblique, and full of irrelevant asides, but he gave the false impression that he was with some company that is affiliated with PG^E and that this was about some pending change in their service.
It would have been rather confusing even had I not been short of sleep, but that condition made it very confusing. The guy wanted to see my gas bill, and it was easier to show it to him than to push aside the snow of gibberish, and then he wanted me to send a text to a number, and that brought a download of what turned out to be a contract, and that was when I finally realized that he was actually selling natural gas, from one of those "alternate providers" that neo-liberal laws have empowered in recent decades as a substitute for either any actual competition, or for adequate regulation of monopolies.
During the entire several-minute-long spiel, the guy had been inching closer which, even though he was masked, was making me increasingly uncomfortable, but when I saw what the whole event was actually all about I got rather pissed off, and just said "I'm not going to read all of this, and I'm not approving anything I haven't read," and I began closing the door. In a final act of desperation he said something about somebody coming out to finish the task if we didn't get it done then, which struck me as certainly false, so I just closed the door.
After I was back in, I did read through some of the digital contract, and the deal was incredibly crappy, and would just about triple my gas bill if I sighed up for it. It's no wonder he was so roundabout. If he simply and truthfully said "I'm from company that sells gas and we will charge you 99 cents a day for unlimited usage," most people would just say no right up front. There might be a few people with big houses and lots of gas appliances for whom that would be a good deal, but that's not most people, and certainly not anybody in this neighborhood. I actually got more pissed off after the guy was gone than I got while he was pestering me. I'm not so much pissed of at the guy, who, even if he is a bit of a grifter, has a crappy job and maybe can't find any better one in our crappy, declining system, but I am very pissed of at the bigwig grifters who run this sort of outfit and the mammon-worshiping officials who enable them.
Anyway. The ret of the evening was uneventful, but I found myself exhausted around eleven o'clock and went to sleep, then woke up at three this morning and have muddled about in a hyper half-consciousness ever since. As much as I hate the idea of missing any actually important emergency phone calls, I think I'm going to have to put my phone into airplane mode while I sleep. I really can't deal with these interruptions anymore. And the next time a salesman comes to my door (may it not be soon) I'm just going to say up front "tell me exactly what you are selling, in as few words as possible, because if I feel like you are wasting my time I'm just closing this door." |
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