The machines aren’t going to gain dominion over humanity in a big spasm of violence. There will be no bloody uprising, no prolonged battles. The machines are going to rise to power by fucking with us until they’ve broken us into tiny fragments of sanity held together by gossamery slivers of delusion that we love technology. Once the machines are in charge, they’ll fix themselves, right? We won’t have to expend time and energy and money replacing them or calling to have them repaired. That might be an upside.

Before I tell you my tale of pre-apocalyptic mechanized woe, I must tell you two things.*

1. I am an alleged technology professional, not a Luddite.

2. I still don’t know who the men with chainsaws were.

Yesterday I thought the cable guy was going to upgrade us to digital cable. I thought that because we’d made an order with the cable company to upgrade us to digital cable. The date they gave me was Monday.

Sunday, our dryer quit working. Monday morning, the washing machine decided that rinsing the clothes was just too much work.. I believe they had a murder-suicide pact, or, more probably, they were the worst appliances ever made.

I called the cable company to try and get a better service window and also to get our Internet connection fixed. It had been down since Sunday night and interventions on my part were proving futile.

It was a little hard to hear the cable guy on the phone because there was a man with a chainsaw undertaking some sort of gardening project.**

Amazingly, I was able to get my Internet connection working in short order and the rep was very friendly and helpful. Good thing, because that made me less inclined to yell at him when I learned they had no record of our cable tv upgrade appointment today.

The little man with the chainsaw was now cutting a tree behind our house into bits. It was at this point that I asked the logical question, Who were these men and what were they doing in my yard?

I was still on the phone so that had to wait. I was transferred to a cable installation customer service rep and I made the order again.

Meanwhile, the kitchen sink was backing up while the dishwasher was running and was about to overflow. Luckily, I’d been put on hold by the cable company (how often do you say that?) and could solve the sink problem before true disaster ensued.

Then the cable company lost my order – while I was still on the phone with them – and we had to start over.

The cable rep kept putting me on hold. I’m pretty sure each time I was put on hold someone somewhere deep in the bowels of Comcast created a new level of increasingly arcane and confusing channel line-up packages to offer me.

“With this one you get HBO, Showtime, the Michael Caine channel, 7 bowling channels, and every other odd numbered station from 1 to 300 is the channel line-up channel. It’s a bargain at twice the price!”

While I was on hold, I bought a new washer and dryer.*** It’s perverse that I could arrange to have two major appliances replaced in the time it took to schedule a cable tv upgrade that I’d already ordered twice.

I couldn’t print the copies of the work-orders, because my laser printer stopped talking to my computer.

When I got off the phone, it seemed like a good time to go out and find out why these strange men were now cutting down my tree.

The men only spoke a Slavic language I couldn’t understand. They couldn’t tell me who hired them or why. Maybe they just hated the tree, I didn’t know. I sent them away before they cut down the trees and shrubs I wanted to keep. They seem to have been hired to clear out the area behind my neighbor’s house, but I’m not sure what’s going on.

I’m not unhappy about the tree, it’s a highly invasive mulberry. What I was upset about was this: if anyone gets to hack the bejesus out of something with a chainsaw around here, it’s going to be me.****

Did I mention all of this happened before 9:30 a.m.? Then the day got more aggravating.

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*There were 3 things, but I forgot the 3rd one.

**Chainsaw man’s co-workers had a gas leafblower and a chipper-shredder. The pit at Darlington during a NASCAR race isn’t as loud as my neighborhood was yesterday morning.

*** To be fair, I saw the death of those machines coming and had already picked the replacements, I just needed to comparison shop and buy them.

**** Maybe not until my machine-karma improves a little bit, though.

I took out all of the foolishness with the Comcast reps and their hardsell on their phoneservice, which is not available in my area.