Damn!

In general service in America is much better than in the Netherlands. But there is one aspect of telephone service that really gets me. We have a security system at our house. It hasn’t worked for the entire five years that we’ve lived here. We have had someone come out from the security company to fix it twice, and we’ve had someone tell us what to do over the phone once, but it never actually fixed the problem. So we gave up and just didn’t use it.

But now it suddenly started beeping, one piercing beep every ten minutes. It drove me berserk, and the lady on the phone told me what to do but it wasn’t making a difference, as usual.

So I asked her if she could tell me how to at least turn the damn thing off.

She told me it would cost $109 to come out, and then another $35 every fifteen minutes that they had to be here. I said, “So the damn thing  hasn’t ever worked, and now it’s being a nuisance as well, and we have to pay money for you to turn it off?”

And here it comes: she asks me to please refrain form using profanities!  I wasn’t completely losing it. I wasn’t calling her any bad names, or even the company.  I was just referring to a system that has been defect since we got it, that we’ve been paying for every month, and that now was beeping loudly every ten minutes, as “the damn thing”.

Way to change the subject!

And since when is “damn” a profanity, anyway? It’s okay to damn heathens, it’s okay to say that God damns America because it allows gay people to, um, well, exist, but I can’t refer to a really, really bad product and the accompanying non-existent support as “the damn thing”? Give me a break!

But what can you do? They have us over their self-righteous barrel. We need the security system to work. So I refrained from further “damns” and they came out, spent two days and a lot of material and new panels to fix . . . it . . . and made us spend a few thousand dollars.

Damn!