'Bred Crumbs

With Support Like This ...

Our modem died in our sleep the other night. We didn't realize that was the problem right away. All we knew was that in the morning, the DSL wasn't working. Thus began, ugh, 24 hours of tech support.

As tech support goes, it was as good as you can expect. For example, all five people we spoke to knew English. One of them, though, did have this bizarre Rain Man thing going that made him suddenly utter words like filter completely out of context and with pronunciation so strange it can't be replicated, so half our conversation consisted of me frantically squeaking, "What are you saying?"

The bigger problem was that, despite the ticket-tracking numbers and all the notes all these people supposedly make, apparently none of them is allowed or equipped to share complete, correct information with each other. And the ones who were generally most helpful and on-the-ball, the online tech agents, were blocked from fixing the problems they diagnosed.

When, three phone calls in, it became clear that the problem was the modem, we went and bought one, taking the risk that the DSL company wouldn't "support" it. The best they could offer was sending us a new one, which would take two business days straddling a holiday weekend. Don't they realize that a week equals 15 years in DSL-addict time?

As it happens, the A/V chain with the big blue slanty-roofed buildings sells a modem with the brand name of the DSL company on it. It hooked right up and the DSL was back – but crawling. Pages were loading at that legendary snail's pace the rival cable-broadband purveyor, in its pants-on-fire ads, claims is true of all DSL. So, back to tech support.

Here's where the corporate schizoid behavior kicked in. One of the superior online techies, Sean, figured out pretty quickly that our speed had been capped to conduct line tests at the beginning of the ordeal. He told us to call Voice Support and have them fix it. But Voice Support didn't care what we or Sean said. Voice Support, following the Book of Novice Tech Support People to the letter, subjected us to an hour of completely useless tests before we gave up in frustration, hoping the problem would magically improve the next morning.

It didn't, but another miracle occurred. The Maintenance department called to see if our DSL problem had been solved so they could close out the ticket. I didn't know we'd ever talked to Maintenance, but hey. I explained the whole situation. She said, "I can fix that." She had me turn off the modem; she changed something; she had me turn the modem back on. The bits flew again, the way they used to. Sean had been right. Shame Sean couldn't have looped in Maintenance earlier, or that Maintenance and Voice Support apparently are going through a tough time in their intra-office sex life and aren't speaking to each other.

But there was a clue to this dysfunction at the beginning of it all. The DSL company has a creepily sophisticated automated answering system, which responds to your voice and gives your very conversational responses. But two out of the first three tries, after I'd cleared all the option hurdles and the she-robot promised to connect me, the system completely dropped my call.

By the way, this particular DSL company is also a phone company.

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You might notice the site design has been slightly tinkered with, and that "previous" links have been added to the bottom of Crumbs pages. Fixed an extremely minor but nonetheless vexing code bug too. And added a quarter to the ratings.

What, this isn't how you're spending your holiday?

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Rambling Obligatory Pride Report

Aside from its being our third anniversary, Robbie and I weren't all that excited about Pride weekend this year. Robbie theorizes that it's because we're so much more focused on our upcoming first Burning Man. But I think it's also because, well, we've done and done the Pride thing. After seven years of attendance, it's very much all the same.

After skipping the parade for the second straight consecutive year, we walked around Civic Center for a short while yesterday, but it was all the same booths, and the same organizations, and all the same everything. If you were a newly married gay couple, or the kind of person who is energized by carrying placards, you probably thought this year's Pride had an extra burst of energy. But Robbie and I are not those people. After only a couple of hours we decided we've rather spend the warm, beautiful day at home.

It's not that I doubt the value of the whole Pride thing. It still rocks to have this annual celebration of the true freedom we are lucky to have in this town, if not the rest of the nation. And for anyone just coming around to his own gay self, I'm sure it's still as much of an eye- and soul-opener as my first Pride parade, in Chicago almost a decade ago, was.

So it's not the occasion or the purpose I'm bored with; just the routines of the event itself. And the bureaucracy. As always, the parade had a theme – "Out 4 Justice," which brings forth queasy images of a love child of Prince and Steven Seagal – and more than 15 grand marshals. I assume next year I'll be a grand marshal, because I'm sure pretty much everyone else in town has been already.

Then again, maybe it's better to honor everyone that to shove people out. This year's Dyke March, the Pride Eve women's parade, made a very big deal, at least in the press, of not letting any men participate, although, said the Chronicle, "Dyke-friendly guys are invited to cheer from the sidewalk." Yeah, count me in. Hurray, exclusion!

(BTW, the Dyke March's organizer goes by the name of "Fresh! White" – exclamation point included. I'll expect this sort of thing at Burning Man, but in the real world, nothing says no credibility like an exclamation point in your name. Though I'm sure that's just one of those silly, evil rules Men make.)

It's just as well that the Dyke March doesn't want me, because it would have just gotten in the way of the one part of the whole weekend drill that was a blast: Pink Saturday, the closed-street revelry in the Castro. After an anniversary dinner, Robbie and I hit the event early, winding up in the very bar (though under new management) that we first connected in, even occupying nearly the same barstools. Instead of milling about, we hunkered down in our cherished seats, as our increasingly sexy bartenders made a night-long game of removing each other's clothing.

It was the kind of night where people even had fun in the long bathroom line, where a stranger and I joked about the responsibility of being the "caboose" of the line. (You had to be there. And probably intoxicated.) At the bar, we were constantly surrounded by joyous men and women, who laughed, cheered as the Giants-A's game on TV reached its exciting conclusion, and placed surprisingly picky and complicated drink orders. What I recall most was the four cowboys startled by the limes placed on their cups of hefeweizen.

"Why is there lime in it?" asked one.

"It comes with lime," the bartender said.

The four beer-drinkers discussed the implications and shock of this development for a while. It didn't seem to occur to any of them to simply take out the limes.

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Oh yeah, we did get a nice (if overdue) anniversary gift from IMDb, which finally completed its entry for CrossWalk by adding us, the writer/director/producers, who've been missing from the entry for a couple of months. Now we're somebody.

And if we can only figure out why the hell the main "if you like this title" recommendation for CrossWalk is Legally Blonde, we'll be set.

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