Mail from me to Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky (who is, in principle, away on holiday with Opal Armstrong Zwicky for the Independence Day weekend), sent at 6:06 am on 7/4 (hugely expanded here):
AMZ > EDZ at 6 am on 7/4. Slept, very uneasily, only from 8:30 pm to 3:54 am. Turned on the tv for news and got an error message:
Something is not quite right. Please give us a call at 1-800-Xfinity and we’ll get this fixed for you.
I have now spent about 2 hours on the phone with Xfinity. It turns out they have transferred the tv connection to a new account at Avant [the independent living community I am moving to on Wednesday 7/8], deleted my old account, and created a new account (with a new ID number), so I have no tv, and it seems to be impossible to give me an account that works at Ramona St.; I eventually got an actual human being who was willing to consider handling the case, but they had to have the ID number of my old account.
Now, they of course had this number, but were requiring me to supply it as a security check — to verify that I was in fact the Arnold Zwicky who had an account with the company. I had no idea what this number was, had no record of it, but they said it was on the monthly bills I got in the mail. I retorted that I got no such bills, it was all done electronically, and they said that in that case it would be on my bank’s monthly statements. I looked at some sample statements, and discovered that none of them supplied this number, in full — and this, I eventually figured out, was for my protection; it’s a security protection, designed to prevent fraud; people armed with this ID number could pretend to be me.
[Digression. Ok, so then we have some kind of catch-22: to verify that you are the holder of this account, you need the account ID, but to prevent fraud being committed in your name the account ID must be publicly concealed from you. I’m not sure how people are supposed to get free of the paradox, but see some discussion below.]
In any case, the Xfinity rep simply refused to believe that I couldn’t access the ID (though they should have understood how their security measures worked) and so did what the reps are trained to do when faced with an apparently uncooperative caller, namely just abruptly hang up).
So I am without tv, including no playing of DVDs, until after everything is installed at Avant. the good news is that only the tv is affected; I still have internet and phone service at Ramona St.
I will now get breakfast.
Here ends the 6 am message to EDZ.
Arnold’s Sunday pleasures and his holiday gift to himself. Regular readers of this blog will have learned that my Sunday mornings tend to be devoted to the composition of blog postings as a kind of focused recreation, to a background of carefully selected gay porn videos, whose purpose is to facilitate a persistent state of low-level but energetic sexual arousal (which might or might not lead to an an eruptive intermission at some point, it’s all easy and unstructured, and, most important, out of daily routines and the busyness of life in public). This counts as free time, allows me to wander wherever my imagination and curiosity take me; nothing has to come from it, and so, every so often, random wonderful things come from it. Meanwhile, the spur of desire helps to drive the whole enterprise; I learned as a teenager that if you have a high sex drive, it can be harnessed to many useful ends (and, whooppee, you get powerful orgasms too).
Now, I understood that this particular Sunday was going to be part of a long solitary holiday weekend, so I thought to lay in extra supplies. I would, in fact, give myself a holiday gift: Naked Sword’s well-crafted gay porn DVD Spain in the Ass 3 (2026) — sorry about the regrettable name — which I put in a rush order for, so it would arrive before Sunday (today).
But then I no longer had any way of playing it here on Ramona St. And in fact, it seems that the shipment was diverted to Avant anyway, so the DVD is not where I am. Much sadness. I am not enjoying any porn. I am not getting any news or commentary on tv. I do have my Apple music, so instead of gay porn I experienced, audio only, some favorite music coming up on rotation through my music library: Beethoven’s piano variations on the “Eroica” theme, followed by lots of Louis Moreau Gottschalk. (They are both a lot of fun, but otherwise do not make a natural class.)
So I’m not adrift on the shifting sands of the Kalahari or anything like that, but this is way not what the doctor self-prescribed.
A catch-22 is a paradoxical situation from which an individual cannot escape because of contradictory rules or limitations. The term was first used by Joseph Heller in his 1961 novel Catch-22.
Catch-22s often result from rules, regulations, or procedures that an individual is subject to, but has no control over, because to fight the rule is to accept it. Another example is a situation in which someone is in need of something that can only be had by not being in need of it (e.g., the only way to qualify for a loan is to prove to the bank that you do not need a loan). One connotation of the term is that the creators of the “catch-22” situation have created arbitrary rules in order to justify and conceal their own abuse of power.
While I was mulling over how to respond to the paradox of the Xfinity ID number — at some point there has to be a way of revealing ID numbers to users or at least of verifying the secure status of a user — I got a very peculiar phone call from an Xfinity bot (in some distant location, maybe it was Baltimore MD). A very short recording that said it was giving me my Xfinity security pin, which I was to keep in a safe place. Then a 4-digit number, read once only (not repeated for clarity and not asking for any assurance of receipt), after which the message abruptly terminated on its own, leaving no copy. (This message will self-destruct)
I take this to be a version of a secret key I have stashed away, I won’t tell you where, for one specific purpose, which I won’t reveal to you. I haven’t yet figured out where I’ll store this one; the problem is remembering where I put it.
Meanwhile, on Wednesday my helpers will install new Xfinity hardware, incorporating the new Xfinity ID number; the literature reminds me that the old number is no longer valid, so I can’t use it any more — for some sense of use it. It does occur to me that I got Xfinity installed so long ago that I once actually did get monthly bills and statements with the number on it. But those days are long gone. And I had no reason to save the number in some special place; after all, it would have been right there on the bill, pretty much like magazine subscription codes, which are right there on the mailing labels.
But then it’s possible I’ve just misunderstood everything. A lot of this feels like wandering around in Wonderland, on the other side of the looking-glass.
And then the holiday went up in smoke.
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