We have moved successfully. Well, semi-successfully. Our stuff was all transported and transported well: the young lads from the moving company were actually nice and helpful and hard-working. It kind of freaked me out, as I was anticipating Teamsterish, sandwich-clutching mesomorphs who would stolidly refuse to move anything, because I'm such a weenie. But no! We got everything into the house okay, and then I promptly broke the toilet by foolishly trying to, you know, use it. My pleas for a plumber were somehow construed by the manager as a demand for a brand-new toilet, which made no sense at all, but it sure caused a lot of baffled screaming on my part, which then immediately made the cable go out.

I'm sure the events are related somehow, anyway. So the wife is going home early today to meet the cable guy "between one and five!" Or so promised the nice cable lady, who allowed me to bully her into an afternoon slot rather than the usual preposterous wasting of an entire workday. Honestly, when did an entire nation--large parts of which are predicated on the notion of good service--suddenly roll over for a bunch of geek failures in ballcaps who provide annoying, desultory service and then soak you for plugging in some fucking co-ax? For these dipshits we willingly sacrifice entire workdays? Cable companies can't contract out to people with efficient scheduling and troubleshooting skills? What if every service was like that? "Hi, I'd like a cab, please." "All right, it'll be about two to six hours." "WHAT?" "Yep. Eat it raw, stupid. Oh, and no matter where you're going, it's gonna cost you forty bucks. How do you like that?" "I hate it!" "I know! But tough! So you still want a cab?" "I guess . . . "

I'm sorry, but this is not the America I want to live in.

It is time now for me to do something I haven't yet really had to do: issue a retraction. In a previous post, I made several mean-spirited jokes at the expense of my new condoneighbors. I implied that they were a bunch of soulless cheese-scarfing yuppies with shiny expensive cars and no taste. I now declare that I couldn't have been more wrong about my new neighbors. They are not yuppies.

They are, in fact, all wizened husks, near-corpses and shambling, blasted zombies with shiny expensive cars and no taste. I have moved into the Condo Of Imminent Death, and it's a little alarming. In the course of one discussion in the lobby with the Head of the Board (estimated age = one million), there were three wheelchairs, two walkers, and one cane spotted. At another point, when the movers were backing the truck into the front roundabout, an agitated woman started saying frantically, "They can't block the driveway! They can't block the driveway!" Later, after I had gotten the truck out of the way, she (with restored composure) explained, "It's a house rule. There are a lot of people who use that roundabout: tenants, deliverypeople, emergency vehicles . . . " She casually dropped "emergency vehicles" in there without noticing that not all apartment buildings have ambulances on full call all the time. I wondered how many tenants had died during our conversation, and whether or not they had nicer apartments than mine.

But then, when I get home and find out that I still have no cable, and I still have no toilet, I'll probably welcome death myself. And look! I'm right where I need to be.