Dear Xcel Energy,

I thought we had a deal? You would hook me up with that sweet, sweet nectar of technology, otherwise known as electricity, and would charge my debit card every month for whatever you figured I used, based on your magical killer watt meters or whatever. In return, I would ignore the paper bills you inexplicably continue to send me that actually say on them “electronic debit please do not pay.”

Now I get a notice in the mail saying you’re going to disconnect me, for failure to pay my bill. What, really? You mean those ones you send me marked “do not pay?”  The ones I dutifully do not, you know, pay? Because, as per our bargain, you were supposed to be helping yourself to my money as you saw fit, and I was cool with that because anything that lets me ignore the piles of crap in my mailbox is fine with me.

Where did this agreement go wrong? At what point did helping yourself to my money with almost no oversight by me stop being agreeable to you? It’s a simple arrangement, really–you take my money, and I ignore your stupid non-bills. One of us was doing his job, anyway.

Now, you know I need electricity, so I’m gonna pay. My computer doesn’t power itself. And eventually my phone will run out of juice, and probably the lights are important too I guess. I’m just a little confused, is all.  What part of “do not pay” was I misunderstanding?

I’m currently having a problem with my Comcast internet. It’s randomly resetting my connection whenever it feels like it. I’ll try to go to a web page, and immediately get “Connection Reset” errors. I’ll reload the page, and it’ll work fine for awhile, then I’ll get errors again later.  Or I’ll go to YouTube, watch half a video, then the video will just stop.  And I can’t restart it. I have to reload the page and hope it doesn’t happen again! I’ve reset my modem and router multiple times, to no avail.

And you know what I’m going to do about this? Nothing. Nothing at all.  I’m going to sit here and just silently hope it goes away on its own in a few days. You know why? Because I just can’t deal with Comcast support. I’m not going to call them and go through half an hour of “troubleshooting” that I’ve already done, or nonsensical bullshit that never works like “unplug the modem and wait 30 seconds.”  Seriously, what problem is that supposed to solve? The problem where the tech needs 30 seconds to do a shot of tequila, maybe? In the history of solid state electronics, the “30 second power cycle” has never, ever solved a single problem. And yet techs still insist on trying it.

I’m not even picking on Comcast in particular here, although everybody knows their support is complete shit. The real problem is, they’re not alone in the tech industry. Everybody’s support is complete shit. And no, don’t tell me you got great support that one time at the Apple store. My experience with Apple was that their go-to “fix” for every problem with my iPhone was to give me a new phone. Which I’ll admit is better than Verizon, who prefer to simply refuse to fix any problems and deny that problems actually exist rather than give me a new device. But it’s still not exactly good support, it’s more like shooting your dog and getting a new one rather than taking him to the vet. It especially sucks when the problem was never with the handset in the first place, it was with AT&T’s shitty towers, so replacing the phone just made me go through heaps of reconfiguration for nothing.

I’m not sure exactly when it happened, but at some point tech support stopped being about fixing problems and started being about getting you the hell off the phone as quickly as possible and making sure you never call back. And hey, that’d be great if the end result was that your problem was fixed quickly and completely. But that’s never the case. The end result is almost always the consumer being pissed off and drained, and, like me, fearful of ever calling again.

So, yeah. This is how they win. I’m not going to call and report this problem unless it becomes completely unbearable. Because even though it might be resolved quickly with a simple reset of my circuit, I’m loathe to go through the long, ridiculous script the no-nothing tech on the other end of the phone will be trying to follow before we get to that part. I’ll just live with it. It’s just the internet.

Maybe I’ll go to the gym.

At work I often have to clean up DNS reverse lookup zones when I reuse an IP address of a decommissioned server, because our Windows admin refuses to do so because “reverse DNS is stupid.” Windows supposedly populates and manages DNS by itself, but it frequently likes to leave old reverse lookup entries behind. So I get to manually remove those old entries.

Just now, I had the following conversation:

Me: “Who named their server SKY NARD?”

Windows admin: “What are you talking about? We never had a server named Sky Nard.”

Me: “It’s right here in the reverse lookup zone you never ever clean up.”

Windows admin: “That’s SKYNYRD man!”

Me: “No, that’s spelled with two Ys. You had a server named Sky Nard and never knew it.”

I attended PAX Prime this past weekend. 70,000 nerds let loose in downtown Seattle was a sight to behold. Pretty much any game you might want to play, be it a board or card game, a tabletop game or RPG, a hand held game, or even many PC and console games were all there for the playing pretty much any time of day or night, if you knew where to look. It was, in a word, Nerdvana.

I learned a lot of new things, but only one was really blogworthy. Before PAX I was only vaguely aware of the idea of watching other people play competitive video games. I of course knew that there are video game tournaments and even professional video game players, but somehow I still imagined this was a thing mostly confined to the people who play the games at high levels. For some reason it didn’t occur to me that other people not involved in the game or somehow related to one of the players would actually sit down and watch such a thing.

I was very quickly set straight on this point at PAX. The League of Legends North American Regionals were held at PAX, and it was a pretty big deal. There was a giant theater filled with hundreds of people watching two teams of five people compete against each other. Not only that, but the games were broadcast live to various TVs scattered throughout the convention center.

I got to see about an hour of this while waiting in line for swag, and even though I wasn’t exactly paying a ton of attention, I did come away with one insight. It turns out, the commentators for most mainstream sports are fucking terrible. I mean, most of the time, when you watch a football or baseball game, the commentators sit there and give you a run-down of what you just saw. If you’re lucky, the color commentator will say something about how the defense were playing a cover 2 there, and that’s why they were able to get the interception.

What they almost never tell you, though, is why the defense was playing cover 2 in that situation. They either just assume you know (which I’m guessing most people do not) or they don’t think you care, or worse, don’t think you’d understand if they explained anyway. Mainstream sports commentators rarely ever talk about overall game strategies. They will often go over the “keys to the game” before the game starts, but usually they talk about ridiculously obvious things like how the offense needs to convert on third down, or the pitcher needs to get lots of strikeouts.

Even worse, lots and lots of sports commentators like to spend a lot of time talking about bullshit like “heart” and “grit” and “hustle.” They talk about things like which team “wants it more.” Which team can “dig down deep” and “find that extra will to win.” As if any of those things fucking matter.

Not so with e-sports commentators. In the hour or so I watched, I never once heard anybody say the words “grit” or “heart.”  I never heard anybody talk about which team wanted it more. And I sure as fuck didn’t hear anybody talk about how one player brings lots of “intangibles” to his team. Instead, they talked about the fucking game, and how well the players were actually playing it. They talked about game strategies and who was using which ones, and why.

Now, I have no idea what a “split push” strategy is in LoL. But I learned that it existed, and I heard about why a certain team liked using it. And best of all, when the players fucked up, I heard the commentators say so, and explain why such-and-such was a bad play. You pretty much never hear that from main stream sports commentators. They tend to be very deferential to the players, especially the stars, and almost never talk about what a terrible play that was, even when it’s obvious to even the most casual fan.

If Derek Jeter played League of Legends competitively, he’d be called out on his horrible defensive skills and nobody would give him a single iota of credit for his “intangibles.” I so wish it were that way in all sports.