Thank you, Doug from AT&T

My secular hero for this Good Friday is "Doug," a repairman from AT&T who appears to have solved a long-standing and extremely vexing problem with my DSL internet and telephone service. I feel like I've had a multi-year toothache relieved. 

There was an intermittent short, apparently, inside the junction box on the back of my house. It was the sort of thing I would have thought any of the three previous repairmen should have been able to figure out too, but they didn't. Once identified, it took two or perhaps three snips of Doug's wire cutters to fix — clearing out some no-longer-used wiring from a previous tenant's multiple-line phone installation.

While I would happily buy Doug a case of cold beer of his choice, I would still enjoy tarring and feathering about 20 of his co-workers at AT&T (or, more likely, its contractors) who've wasted dozens and dozens of hours of my time over the last 3-4 years by insisting that the problem must have been in my modem or my router or my browser or my computer's networking settings or anywhere but in AT&T's wiring. (Two or three of them insisted that my problems — including my too-frequent but random periods with download speeds of only 10-12 kbps, slower than the worst dial-up service — were figments of my imagination. Or: "High-speed internet service, sir, doesn't necessarily mean continuously high speeds! You yourself admit that you were getting mostly good connections last week.") Those idiots all owe solemn apologies to my poor dog, who has concluded that she was at fault on all the occasions when their incompetence has gotten me so very angry. (I've already apologized to her, many times; and of course she always forgives me whether I deserve it or not.)

Large bureaucracies, as we all know, often shelter incompetents from their just deserts. But for the bureaucracies to keep functioning even at the minimal level of overall competence they must maintain to avoid finally toppling over, they must each include at least a few people who actually know their business. One such is Doug the Repairman; that he is so clearly part of an endangered species makes me all the more grateful to have finally encountered him this morning. Cheers, Doug!