A Fear Of Commitment

I've never purchased anything on installment (not even on 0% interest for 12 months), never borrowed money from a bank or even from the SSS (I understand we're allowed to, one of those adult things I was never aware of.), and I've been wary of entering contracts of any sort. The closest thing I've gotten to binding myself to some corporate entity is my 2-year postpaid mobile phone contract and 1-year broadband contract. And even when that broadband contract ended last year, I didn't apply for retention despite the various enticements that Smart offered. (A printer, or a phone or some minuscule monthly rebate. Right.) The reason is, I don't like committing myself to these things because some obscure event might trigger me changing my mind in an instant. Like what happened this week.

It was one of my very rare days off and internet at home was busted. Called tech-support and after having established that I had basically done every form of resetting, restarting and reconfiguring that they could throw at me, they promised to send someone the next day to fix the antenna thingamajig. Somebody came, went up the roof and rotated the antenna. Internet was still a little slow but at least there was a connection. Tech guy said there was some ongoing technical enhancement and that the connection should improve in a couple of hours. Wasn't really able to check on that because I had to go on yet another 36-hour duty.

37 hours later, status post double code and a final gunshot wound admission, I arrived home, exhausted, feeling a little sick and STILL with fcky internet. Signal was so erratic, I had 12 hours until I had to go on a 24-hour duty and sad to say, I spent those precious hours trying to fix things. Called tech support and he goes, "Open command prompt and type 'ipconfig release'" repeatedly and I kept saying "Dude, it says incomplete command. Isn't there supposed to be a forward slash there somewhere?" And then he goes, "Um, why don't you try that. And uh, type 'ipconfig'... you know about this already, right?"

"NO." Okay, maybe it isn't his fault he mistook me for some IT person because I can sound like such a smart ass. Anyway, I wouldn't have gotten pissed if he didn't tell me that, "Maybe you should have your LAN card checked. There's nothing wrong from our end here. Maybe there's something wrong with your laptop."

Maybe there was something wrong with my LAN card. I'm not tech-savvy enough to know what that even looks like but he seriously couldn't explore the possibility that maybe, just maybe, there's something wrong with the antenna? My phone had the same problem with the WiFi and I'm not sure if phones even have LAN cards, should I go have that checked, too? And so I was pissed. And that state of pissed-ness led to a 2-year contract with Globe. I went to their wireless center, purchased one of their portable WiFi things and applied for cancellation of my subscription to Smart.

So the moral of the story is, try not to get pissed when you've only had 3 hours of sleep. Or you'll end up paying P1,300 every month for the next 24 months.