"Good enough" really is good enough for me most of the time. I am a man of simple tastes and few ambitions. Any penalties that my lack of competitive drive have incurred have been more than ameliorated by my sense of laid-back equanimity. It's when events disrupt my comfortable state of deliberate equilibrium that I get, well, whiny.
I was fine with the speed and performance of my current DSL service. It's easy to install and maintain, and hotswitching the router between PC and the Xbox can be done in a couple of minutes. Despite marketing propaganda's push to shame me as a narrow bandwith luddite, I've never been one to measure the size of my manhood in Mbps. The "bigger, badder, faster" mindset leads to things like Hummers, McMansions, and eventually total environmental and economic collapse.
For years I've been resisting the dinner-and-showertime robocalls from my ISP urging, nay browbeating, my wife and I to upgrade to FIOS. I didn't trust the pricing of the service, regardless of the front end deals offered. I had no desire to let some stanger into my house to screw around with the wiring. Most importantly, I definitely didn't want said stranger to fuck around with my carefully maintained computer and/or uploading company junkware onto it as part of some "special package."
Yet that's exactly what's going to happen tomorrow morning. Yeah, I know -- "Poor, poor Andrew having to suffer through the horror of having super high-speed internet service installed." It's still a pain in the ass, though, as I have to spend most of my day clearing space and cleaning the monumental clutter that has accumulated around my workstation over the past few years in order to give a person or persons unknown free access to my secret lair.
The Kings - Switchin' to Glide (from The Kings Are Here, 1980) - Does not include new wave installation surcharge, hooky parts and labor, or any applicable local taxes on synth usage.
Clarence Reid - If It Was Good Enough for Daddy (from Running Water, 1973) - Bring on the punch cards, rotary phones, and heavy-ass funk!
(If there's no post tomorrow, just assume something went catastrophically wrong.)
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4 comments:
Thanks! Things turned interesting after I opened up the PC for some air-dusting and realized that the size and placement of the many PCI/AGP peripherals made it impossible to slot the required ethernet card.
Things got a bit dicey when I explained this to my wife and asked her to postpone the installation...
All's well that ends well.
Under the misguided impression that The Kinks were playing at Toronto’s small club The El Mocombo (hey, the Rolling Stones had done it) I called to see if there was any chance tickets were still available – I had also just discovered this show was happening, even though, apparently, it had been advertised for weeks. I called the El Mocombo and lo and behold not only were tickets available but I found myself speaking to the band’s lead guitarist who informed they were doing a sound check and he figured he’d answer the phone. I waxed eloquent about what a great band they were and he was very grateful for the compliments. When I asked why he didn’t have a British accent, he laughed. Later, when I told him my new favourite song was Superman (from The Low Budget LP) well, that’s when he figured it out. “We’re not The Kinks, we’re The Kings,” he informed me. I wasn’t sure who was more disappointed. Still, I promised him I’d go down (hey, there were tickets available) and I have to say, they put on a pretty good show.
Enjoy the high speed!
As I recall, the Kings are from Ohio, and in the 80s I lived in Columbus. A Friday morning didn't work at all to herald the weekend without my alarm going off to whatever rock station I listened to then playing this song.
Thanks for posting this all time classic of rock and roll, in the "Unknown" category.
WRIF in Detroit used to run a parody of this song all the time when I was a kid. It was sung by Dick the Bruiser (or whichever DJ did his voice).
I can still remember most of the lyrics:
"Any beer can be selected/I'm drinkin' it up, I'm drinkin' it down" etc. etc.
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