In order to properly understand why I’m so angry at AT&T, you’ll need a little bit of background.
I guess in order for things to be perfectly clear, we’ll have to go back to the magical month of June in the magical year of 1980. It was a strange time for the United States. Things were just heating up in a presidential race that pitted a former B-movie actor from California against a former peanut farmer from Georgia. Calves everywhere were being consumed by striped tube socks whose sights were firmly set on the knee itself. Sadly, they would never make it, with sock height reaching its high-water mark around 1983. Any pretense of connecting drug use to heightened spirituality had been pronounced officially dead and buried, which of course did nothing to actually slow the consumption of drugs, as the annual sales figures for Quaaludes and cocaine would prove.
The international arena was no less clogged with phenomena possessing unusual historical gravity. A fresh-faced Osama bin Laden was spending his nights getting thrown out of any number of the clubs that constitute Riyadh’s infamous party district. Cars that could cross the Gobi desert on a tablespoon of gasoline were being churned out of Japanese industrial ports at unprecedented rates. The Canadian parliament voted unanimously to prolong indefinitely its country’s “sleeping giant” status. And in a hospital in the frozen Scandinavian capital of Copenhagen, Denmark, a young man was being unceremoniously torn from the quiet bliss of the womb and exposed to all of the crappiness above.
So powerful was this individual’s desire to insulate himself from a world populated by binge-drinking terrorists-to-be and ex-movie stars with nuclear weapons at their disposal that he repositioned himself within his glowing and soft little world in such a way to safeguard against the possibility of someday falling out of the uncharted hole that had been a menacing presence from the very start. But those bastards on the outside weren’t about to just let a man sit contentedly with his thoughts for a couple of decades, not as long as they had to suffer. They sliced through the walls with terrible tools and yanked the boy out by his feet. Thus the unceremoniousness of the introduction. And in light of what we can all now agree was an essentially unforgivable act of jealousy and oppression, thus the misanthropy. You see, I was that man. I know how betrayed he felt. And that’s where it all began; that’s where I lost all faith in humanity.
That very same day saw the drying and hardening of the idea that might at first only have had the consistency of wet, unhardened concrete. First came the cold, then the lights, the smack on the ass, the rough towels, being tossed around by enormous, hairy giants, and then finally, just as I had resigned myself to living such a fast-paced, hectic and stressful life, complete and utter isolation. This ushered in the next shock, which came in the form of a terrible and unsettling lesson. I could look to my left and right and see others who at first glance appeared to be just like me: same approximate size, same indecent state of undress, same penchant for producing shrill, sustained shrieks.
But then I got the bigger picture. The young man next to me: blonde hair, blue eyes. The young lady on my other side: blonde hair, blue eyes. Above me, below me, on the other end of the room, always the same thing: blonde hair and blue eyes. My first grain of self-esteem?a modest appreciation of my cocoa locks and chestnut eyes?had been viciously wiped aside by the brutal realization that I was the anomaly; I was the freak. The lesson hit hard and left a lasting impression. If I was going to survive in this world, I had only one weapon at my disposal: unqualified contempt for others.
By the time I had been safely airlifted from the urine-soaked hellhole that is Northern Europe and brought to this reasonably enlightened country, where a man can have brown hair in peace, the damage had already been done. I had been hardwired to mistrust.
Now fast-forward a bunch of years. You’ll be skipping past countless scenarios in my childhood and adolescence that further steeled my resolve against humanity. The pre- and early- adolescent periods were especially rough, having the strange effect of touching off a temporary shift from general misanthropy to a more specific (well, slightly) misogyny. I won’t go into it now, but the whole ugly business basically revolved around a number of instances in which I was the subject of such unrepentant cruelty at the hands of the female sex that all of my contempt was siphoned into their one category. This didn’t last, however, as the years since have offered me hindsight enough to illuminate the fact that nearly everybody at that stage was responsible for some unrepentant cruelty in the eyes of someone else. So it was back to the basics.
But if we move past all of that and settle upon the date of this past Monday, the petty drive behind writing such vitriol is revealed: AT&T Wireless, smug cretins that they are, would not let me cancel my account unless I agreed to pay a sum of $150. What the hell is that? Did I sign my name in blood? I’ve paid all of my monthly bills. Where do they get off telling me that I’m committed to own and pay for a cell phone even after I’ve decided I don’t want their service anymore? Bunch of assholes, if you ask me.
