Back to the 20th Century! or Déjà Vu

First, let me tell you this story.

Back in 2001 we bought our first house in a small town in MA. In the days before the closing, when I was calling the utilities to have them started in our names in the new house I was appalled to find out that I could not have a regular phone company phone line and internet provider in that town because they had their own phone company! A local friend of ours explained that sometimes they referred to our new town as "old people town." :)

I had to drive down to the house where the phone company was located to start our account and I couldn't believe my eyes when the receptionist pulled out a form, inserted it into a typewriter and typed down our information! Then, she pulled out a print out with a list of four numbers and asked me to pick the last four digits of our number! So quaint! At least we had cable there which was not through the phone company and their internet wasn't that bad.

Fast forward to 2011, ten years later, and to our fourth house.

Well, well, well... last Friday I found out two very disappointing things when I was talking to the nice lady in the electric company:

1) In our new town there's no cable, only sattelite TV. This is very bad for our family because it completely rules out us having just a small number of channels for a small monthly fee, which is what we've been doing for over 10 years now. We don't watch TV, only very rarely, but that doesn't mean we don't want to have ANY access to it, particularly to PBS and the broadcasting channels. This was not the worse, though.

2) We cannot have cable (or, for that matter, fiber optics) internet either, only DSL, and there's only ONE ISP that monopolizes service in that area (we thought it was just our county, but it's actually several counties and going into the neighboring state). The problem is... we haven't had a landline for nearly five years now, only a "VOIP" phone line which allows us to make unlimited calls for over 35 countries & within the U.S. (including cell phones here) -- I highly recommend it! So it's in fact a double problem:  we need to have high speed internet (and of course we live online) and we don't need a phone line, but for DSL internet, we will have to pay to have a phone line (about 20 per month, in addition to the 60 dollars that they charge for their highest speed - 10 mb per second -- if we have a one year contract). This is all so incredibly annoying! BIG SIGH!

Seriously, had we known about this, we might have reconsidered buying a house in that town. Because as much as we love the neighborhood and the house itself, for the same money we could have bought a spanking brand new house 300 sq ft. larger than the one we're buying (but of course 10-15 minutes farther from the boys' school -- not a really big deal). Sigh again. We've decided we're going to fight this local phone company and try to bring some competition to the area, but we have no idea how exactly we can do this. K has already called the state communications department or commission, whatever it is, and they said that there isn't a real "monopoly," but we'll see! I don't mind collecting signatures, doing whatever it takes to get better internet service! After all... I live online, don't I?

Wish us luck!

We close at 9 tomorrow, then, I have to go teach, then K has to host an academic colleague and see his talk, which completely ruins our plans to get started on painting and other stuff at the new place. and next week will be CRAZY, with field trips for one of the boys, soccer games, lots of work events for K & I. I don't even want to think about it! :( But I know we'll survive. We always do. And... I KNOW -- nothing that I wrote here constitutes real problems. These are ridiculously preposterious first world troubles. That's one of the reasons why I hadn't blogged about this yet. Not with the latest events as well, but it was tonight or never, so I went for it. My apologies for being whiny, but even K -- who hates whining -- is upset with this situation.