Wednesday, November 23, 2005

No to Dial-up Connection (and to expensive phone bills and tantrums)


Lorelie refused Emily's broadband connection gift to Rory in one of Gilmore Girl's first episodes. She said that she wants to "dance around the house while waiting fo something to download via dial-up". If they were real people, I'd say, 'What the hell were they thinking'! Nobody in their right minds would trade a broadband connection for dial-up! I tried, in vain,to subscribe for Broadand. Globelines has no service area in QC, Bayantel's facilities in our area are all used up, and PLDT (never mind, more of that later). And I am stuck with dial up! It's hard when you are pampered with fast connection in the office and even in cheap internet cafes. Just downloading a 5MB file is a real pain in the ass! x( I am actually waiting for the SBC Yahoo v.3 browser to download and so far, the 3 mins download counter time really is equal to 15 real-time mins! Back then, I would go to sleep at around 3am with 20 songs queued for download on Kazaa and would wake up with about 10 of them completely downloaded, God knows how long did each download take to finish!

And speaking of phonelines/dial-up connection, I can still recall one major headache I gave my father back in 2003. Being the innocent Regina that I was back then (*cough cough), I used my Manila unlimited dial-up account username,password and access number in Bulacan. That means, I was dialling long distance! After 20 days or so, the bill came, and it was a whopping 50,000+ pesos (that's about a thousand dollars). It actually went up to 60k after 15 more days. I was scared to death of my father's reaction. To my advantage, my younger sister got pregnant out of wedlock that time, and 5 digit residential phone bill isn't as big of a deal as a teenage pregnancy. I remember my dad screaming at me on a Sunday morning after he got the bill but the only sanction my dad imposed was stripping me off of the automatic voltage regulator and the power cord,and I easily got a work-around for that by borrowing one from my sister's boyfriend. He was too busy with my sister's present status to worry about the bill.
My dad left the country for Texas a month after he found out that bill. No, that was not for the reason of trying to evade that phonebill, but to accompany my then pregnant sister. I tried to pay off the bill, but up until now, I haven't finished paying it. And,don't ever,ever think that I never regretted doing that. I'm sorry because not only I caused that big of a headache to my dad but also I deprived myself of availing PLDT's services (most especially that very cheap 384kbps for just P999/month).
So much for that, I guess I'd just do my crossstitch while waiting for these updates that I am downloading.
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When you are keeping something to your self, you tend to blow like an over-sized Bazooka balloon when you can't contain your emotions no more. That is whay I happened earlier to me. The Bazooka pink gum exploded and stuck to my face. I promised myself not to be too much dramatic with my life, but I guess when you are just comfortable with the people you are with, you just show all of your emotions, be it good or bad emotions, and when you think that if you try to suppress it, it would just go away as if you never felt that way. I am sorry, you know who you are.

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