Dear Readers
I’d like to apologize. I’m late.
It’s two p.m. and I’m just getting the web site updated from 12/3; I’d normally have the job done by 6 a.m. But not so this morning. At a little after five I came stumbling into my office to discover that all lines of communication with the outside world had been severed. The land-line was knocked out and the DSL connection had been neutralized. But by whom? That is the question that would require no less than seven hours to answer. But answered it was.
Lynn and I live a quiet life in the country, more or less in a clearing in oak woods. We’ve been here for seventeen years and we’ve made lots of friends and very few enemies. Very, very few, I would argue. Yet who was it that had vandalized our home, cut us off from family, friends and even help if we needed it?
The AT and T Help Desk for West Coast customers opens for business at 8 a.m., which gave me three hours to turn over the various scenarios, each with its own cast of characters. By 8:45 I’d received promises from both robotic and human Help people that I could expect a service call by five in the evening, but to my great surprise the AT and T repair man pulled up the gravel driveway by ten, and better yet it was Harold. Harold had been to Whiskey Creek probably a half dozen times before. Back in the mid-otts, when Joe the Goat destroyed AT and T’s service equipment, some years later when rats were the culprits, and of course a few of the really bad winter storms.
I met Harold at the entry door and our eyes met just long enough to acknowledge the gravity of the situation.
“Again. Dammit. Again.,” he said as I swung open the door. I nodded somberly. Yes, Harold and I had been here before. He knew the layout…and the usual list of suspects.
Well, to make a long story short, the repair man checked underneath the house, determined that the problem was on the pole, called his boss to have a splicer sent over, got the splicer up and down the pole safely and came up to the house to report.
“All done,” he said, “and you were right. That was no accident.”
“I knew it,” I said, “I just FELT it.”
After explaining to me what had happened to the fouled line, (a woodpecker had spent a considerable amount of time pecking a hole through the gray plastic box that housed the twisted mass of wires and transistors and such, a hole big enough for a squirrel to squeeze inside, where it did just that, chewing the plastic insulation. But Harold admitted there was one thing he just didn’t understand.
“I get the squirrel. Hell, that’s just what squirrels and rats and such do. Too dumb to know it ain’t food. But why the hell did that pecker want inside the plastic enclosure, and want enough to make him come back and peck day after day,” he said finally? “Weren’t no bugs ‘er beetles to get. And I read them peckers are smart enough to be able to sniff and know there’s food to be had.”
“Just stupid,” I suggested.
“I guess, “Harold replied.
So that’s why I’m late today. R