Was that an earthquake, or are you just happy to see me?

So I woke up late this morning when the dog jumped into my bed and made the bed shake a little bit, and wouldn’t stop jumping around so I sat up to shoo him off and at that point I remembered I don’t have a dog, so it must have been an earthquake instead. It was about time to get up anyway, so I wandered into the bathroom with the building still shaking, begun brushing my teeth, and by the time I was done it was done. Talk about a non-event.

Earthquakes in general are deadly occurrences not to be taken lightly, but whatever this little tremor was this morning, it sure feels like it deserves to be made fun of. After all, according to the New York Times (and ain’t it cool when the first news report you can find concerning a Los Angeles seismic event comes from a New York newspaper), two picture frames fell off a wall somewhere, but thankfully, neither one broke. Elsewhere, two people had minor head injuries – not from the earthquake itself but from diving under tables and hitting their heads in the process. Just can’t imagine that little bit of earth shaking caused anyone to feel the need to take cover; if I hadn’t already been asleep for nine hours and about to wake up anyway, I bet I’d have slept right through it.

So while today marked the first time I’ve ever been woken up by an earthquake, that’s not what today ended up being about at all. I decided that if I’m going to end up doing something as absurd as moving because I can’t get reliable internet, then it’s going to be because I exhausted every possible avenue of recourse first. So I spent even more time on the phone with AT&T, not getting anywhere with anyone there until they finally decided to put me through to their “Macintosh specialist” – who oddly kept referring to it as a “Macintish” – and while this guy neither had me do anything with my Mac nor seemed to know anything about the Mac, he let it slip that the bizarre sequence of flashing lights on my DSL modem means that the phone lines here are just crap, and the DSL is never going to work reliably until they send someone out to re-wire the place, which isn’t going to happen because they’re not going to officially admit that that’s the case. But then I already knew that.

That takes me back to Time Warner and their cable internet, which they still won’t let me have until after I’ve produced an electric bill with my name on it, and even then they’re not sure whether they’ll accept that as proof or not, depending on who at Time Warner I’m speaking with. So I take another shot at getting the power company to send me a bill, as it’s been two months and they still haven’t sent me anything, and they tell me they’re not due to read the meter for the first time until next week. This is, of course, after she spends a good ten minutes telling me that there is no account for my apartment and tries to convince me that the electricity hasn’t been turned on here for the past two months. You’d think the light bulbs and the refrigerator and the air conditioning would be a dead giveaway that that can’t possibly be the case, but you know, if your computer screen tells you that the power has been off for two months at a certain apartment, then it must be true.

However, and perhaps because she felt sorry for me due to the fact that I’ve apparently been without electricity for two months and I didn’t even know it, she said she was willing to send me a statement of service in the meantime which has my name and address on it, so that I can use it to try to convince Time Warner that I really do live here. Which is kind of odd, because the last several times I’ve called the electric company and asked for exactly that, I’ve been told they don’t do that. But this lady wants to send me one and I haven’t even asked, and somehow she knows it’s because of Time Warner. Apparently the trick was to not ask for it, and wait for them to telepathically determine that that’s why you’re calling, and then they’ll send it to you. Why couldn’t I have figured out that trick two months ago?

In any case, the whole thing’s out of my hands now. Assuming the power company really does send me some kind of statement this week, I’ll take that down to the Time Warner offices, and they’ll either accept it as proof that I live here or they won’t. And if they don’t, I’m moving to a new apartment on September 1st and that’ll be the end of that bizarre little chapter of my life. Plan Z with Time Warner should work, but then again I’m already looking at the classifieds, so that tells you how much faith I have in the whole thing at this point.

You know, it occurs to me that in the two months I’ve lived here, mail has arrived at this address with between twenty and thirty different people’s names on it, never the same last name twice. The building’s only about twenty years old, so there’s just no way this apartment could have had that many legitimate residents during the entire lifespan of the building, even if every single one of them forgot to forward their mail when they moved out. I have a strange feeling that the previous tenant was subletting this place out to one drifter after another, that’s why there’s so much random mail coming here and that’s why the utility companies jump out of their skin when I call them and give them this address. Time Warner won’t touch it, the power company can’t figure out what’s going on, and it’s as if no one even stayed here long enough to figure out that the phone lines are bad, or someone would have had it repaired by now.

Had to get all that nonsense off my mind, and since by late afternoon the internet was completely gone and I couldn’t get any work done anyway, I headed down to the subway station and jumped on a train headed eastward. I only made it as far as Hollywood and Western (which is oddly due east of here) before I hopped off the train because I realized I’d never explored that far east. I walked eastward from Western and didn’t find anything terribly interesting until I got over to Vermont, at which point I found a whole other little downtown neighborhood-type area (how’s that for a description?). Stopped at Fatburger for dinner (didn’t even know there was one in that part of town), walked down to the intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Sunset Boulevard, which a little odd seeing as how the two roads run parallel to each other, and then ventured a little further to where Sunset intersects with Santa Monica, again, roads that are supposed to run parallel to each other. That alone made the area interesting (someone on Twitter joked that perhaps this morning’s earthquake knocked the roads out of alignment), but what I found fascinating was that here was this whole area of Los Angeles I didn’t even know existed, not very far away from where I live, until I took a random trip on the subway.

Took the train home and, well, the day’s shot at this point. Which is ironic because now the internet’s working, for however long it lasts, and I’m in no mood to do any of the work that needs to be done which requires the internet. Two of the phone interviews I was supposed to do this week happen to be locals so I’ve turned them both into in-person interviews (in which case you have to ask yourself why I set them up as phone interviews in the first place), and the third one isn’t going to be published until September anyway so there’s no harm in waiting on that one. In fact, aside from those three, I think I’ve already done every interview I’m going to do prior to New Media Expo. At this point it’s about writing up the ones I’ve already conducted, getting the next few issues out the door (even if I have to go work from an internet cafe), and preparing for exhibiting at the Expo.

So here’s hoping that the bizarre phone call with electric company today doesn’t lead them to mistakenly shut off my power just so reality matches up with what their computer screen says (hey, that’s exactly what they did to me the day after I moved in), here’s hoping that I can finally convince those bastards at Time Warner that I really do live here, and here’s hoping that today’s joke of an earthquake isn’t a prelude to a real one.