16 PUNCHMAGAZINE.COM {sloane citron} attacks. This is perhaps the most abysmal company on the face of the earth when it comes to customer service, lagging only slightly behind the Kyrgyzstan post office. The latest issue that I was trying to solve was a simple one: We used to have 150 hours of recording time and now we had 12 hours. I bravely decided to tackle this on a recent night. I was on the phone with “Shannon” for over 70 minutes. Shannon had a brightness and skill-solving ability just below that of my two older grandchildren, both age six. She continued to insist that each TV in my home had its own recording device, as if we were still using TiVo. She could not understand that everything is on the cloud and there is one “cloud” of all our TVs. I found myself asking questions like, “Have you ever helped anyone before or am I your first customer?” While being transferred to another agent, the line went dead. I think Shannon had had enough of me. It took me 45 minutes and an episode of Loudermilk to calm down enough so that I could even think about going to sleep. I decided that I might have better luck if I just went to the Comcast store in Palo Alto and was able to look a human in the eye. Shortly before I closed down for the night, I received a text from Comcast/Xfinity telling me that since I have been a customer for 29 years, I could get a free phone and service for a year, powered by Comcast. The irony struck me. If I had an Xfinity phone, which certainly would not work well because it is from them—and this is the kind of customer service I’d have to rely on—my family would be doomed to a cold hot tub and no music. But at least I might be able to get the washer running. I like a simple life with basic things. I drive a 13-year-old Range Rover with buttons and switches—intuitive functions. As opposed to some of my friends with new one-panel display operating systems in their cars, I actually know how to turn on the air conditioning or change a radio station without getting annoyed. It stands to reason, then, that I’m also not a phone guy. I am not very good at it, and I don’t care to change that. My family is constantly haranguing me because I don’t see their texts, or their messages or their WhatsApp calls or their emails. There are just way too many ways to communicate. Which brings me to our home that has been freshly renovated. After some considerable time away from it, we have moved back in. The remodeled home is a stunning testament to my wife and daughter’s abilities, but for a person who likes simplicity and constancy, there is a lot of modern complexity. The electronics guy came by to show me how to operate the home (and, apparently, my entire life). We started on music. Do I have Sonos? Nope. Do I have Spotify? Nope. Do I have Pandora? Nope. He looked at me as though I was from Mars. He put Sonos and Amazon music on my phone (he also hooked up my treasured CD player) and then tried to show me, mostly in vain, how to turn on each speaker, adjust its volume, choose a music source, select CD, hit play and hold my breath to see if it worked. If I wanted to listen to music before, I put in the CD I wanted and pressed play. It worked perfectly. Now, I have to find my phone, find the app, control the speakers, find the app for playing my CD player and I still have to put in the CD! Then maybe I’ll have music. I’m doubtful. The electronics guy then wanted to show me how to use the security system. Apparently, we have 30 cameras in every location. (I looked for one when I first used the bathroom, but thankfully, they skipped that room.) But I told him that I had enough for the day and that if someone wanted to come steal all my stuff, that would be fine with me. Next, the pool guy came by to explain that, rather than the easy-to-use keypad housed in a closet in our “old” home, the controls are now all on my phone and in the cloud. He spent hours getting it to work, but the truth is that since I don’t use it a lot, I’ll never remember how it works and will have to call the guy to explain it to me each time I want to adjust the pool temperature or turn on the hot tub. I already envision the stress I will be under when a bunch of the grandchildren show up to hop in the hot tub and I can’t get anything to work, and the pool guy is unreachable in Bucharest. There is good news though: I can now operate most of our appliances—washer, dryer, refrigerator, freezer, dishwasher—with my phone. There’s an exciting opportunity. Xfinity or Comcast (What is its name?) promised to move all of our services from our temporary digs at the rental house back to our regular home. The process that I have gone through to accomplish this task (still unresolved) has brought me to the brink of several heart the un-simple life
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