I know, most of you probably didn’t realize I wasn’t around. After all, when you’re just looking for pictures of Cote de Pablo, Liv Tyler, and Gabriel Anwar you may just miss the fact that I haven’t posted anything in a week. Well to keep you folks happy:

For the rest of you, a brief explanation. I will freely admit that it started with a mistake on my part. A mix-up with due dates and payments made and I didn’t pay Brighthouse on time. I really didn’t realize we were behind. Beyond that, we missed, or didn’t get, any notice that the bill was due. That’s where I stop taking the blame.

I was given the impression that I needed to go into their office. The problem was I was at work on Friday and couldn’t get off in time to get in there before they closed, besides which they decided to shut everything off mid morning. No Phone, no television, no internet. Still thinking, erroneously it turns out, that I needed to go into the office I went the weekend without being able to get online, missing my bRight@Night show, and missing the weekends playoff games. The cruelest cut was not seeing the premier of 24 season 8.

Of course it doesn’t end there. Monday was Martin Luther King day — another day for their office to be closed. And another two hours missed of the latest Jack. As you can imagine I was there first thing Tuesday morning. That’s where it get really good.

I was told two things that really got my blood pressure elevated. One, I never needed to go into the office (despite what we were first told). I could have taken care of things online or over the phone. Of course the facts that I couldn’t get online or use the home phone were just cruel irony. The second thing I learned was that the earliest they could get out to cut the service back on was Wednesday. Now understand that cutting service back on involved the complicated process of opening a box on the side of the house and reattaching a coaxial cable. When they finally did that (the good part is coming next) the procedure took a hot minute. So now you can add to the list of things missed the Massachusettes Massachusetts election returns. I didn’t find out about Brown’s great win until Wednesday morning when I got to work.

I was told that they were going to make sure that someone would hook things back up by 8pm. Around seven, with nothing going yet, I got on my cell and gave them a call. After listening to the same 60 bars of hold music over and over I was told that the note to come out on Wednesday never made it to dispatch and that there was no way anyone would be out that night.

I made it very clear that that was unacceptable. They made it very clear that there was nothing I could do about it. Turns out they were right.

Well, yesterday morning before noon they fixed things. In less than 60 seconds.

So, I’m back. I spend last night catching up on, well, everything. I watched the first three out of four episodes of 24 (I still have to catch up with the Blogs4Bauer liveblogging), read (and deleted) a ton of email, and tried to catch up on the items in my feed reader.

Thanks for listening to my rant. And for the Rule 5 rest of you: