Le Guin, Ursula K. - Gifts

Orrec and Gry live in the Uplands, where every clan has a gift. Gry's gift is calling animals, while Orrec's is to wreak havoc on anything he lays his eyes on. But even though the power balance of their society centers around the gifts, which keeps various clans in check, neither Orrec nor Gry really want to use their gifts the way everyone else wants them to.

I feel like I should have been much more touched by this than I was. This is a very quiet book; I knew that, and yet, for some reason, I kept expecting big, flashy moments. And part of me was glad that the big flashy moments never came, or if they did, that they were undercut. The other part of me has been feeling blah for a while and was probably not in the right mood to read this book.

That said, I did like how Le Guin portrayed Orrec's care with regard to his highly destructive gift, the doubt and the discomfort that it causes him. I also very much liked the friendship between him and Gry, how solid and dependable and non-flashy it was. And I liked the way Le Guin handled Orrec and Gry's decisions to not use their gifts the way everyone thought they should, how it wasn't couched as teenage rebellion or as anything large. It's instead a personal decision on both their parts.

I think I should have been much more affected by this book than I was, because I totally admire the craft in the story and how it went. I just never quite emotionally connected to it for some reason.

Comcast woes

@#$@^$@%^@#$

I continue to hate Comcast.

When I first moved from Very Old Apartment to Old Apartment, Comcast managed to misfile my account transfer order and ended up cancelling the account while I was still in Very Old Apartment. No internet makes Oyce very, very unhappy.

What makes Oyce even unhappier is discovering upon getting the account reinstated, that account deletion apparently permanently deletes the email account as well and that you can't take your old username, even if it's on a deleted account.

To make matters worse, this was when I was job searching and my email was on all my resumes.

After panicking and making my ex call Comcast to be mean to them, they finally reinstated my email and promised that it wouldn't happen again.

Upon the move from Old Apartment to Current Place, I called Comcast once more to transfer the account. The lady I arranged this with must have thought I was incredibly paranoid because I asked about ten times to make sure that the order was to transfer my account, not delete it. And I asked ten more times if I would still have my old email address.

All this was confirmed, and the Comcast people arrived to install the new modem when I was out treating the people helping me move to lunch. The guys told me that my mom had forgotten my email address so they put it down as [myfullname]@comcast.net. They said I'd be able to switch it back to my old email address easily.

Me being stupid, I filed this away under the "To-Do" list and forgot about it, as my email was still working.

After a while, my mom emailed me to tell me that my emails were bouncing. Since I was still getting all my emails, I assumed that she'd just typed in something wrong. Then I got a message today saying my email was bouncing, along with another email expressing surprise that I'd replied, since they'd gotten a bounce back mail.

I went to Comcast live chat.

The guy proceeded to tell me that [oldemail]@comcast.net still existed, but that it was associated with a different account. I dug out my Old Apartment account number and address and gave it to him. To my great surprise, Chat Guy said that it wasn't there, either.

I immediately thought back to Comcast woes of old (read: nearly pulled out my hair and typed obscenities into the chat and threw my keyboard against a wall), dug out Very Old Apartment's address and account number, only to find that Comcast, in their great wisdom, had never transferred the email address to my Old Apartment account, and as such, never transferred it to Current Place account.

Of course, to transfer it, Chat Guy needed much information (thankfully all of which I had, yay ipconfig /all commands), and let me know that all my stuff would be deleted off the Comcast servers as they transferred my account. I am too tired to be angry about this, and, thank heavens, I don't actually have much on there and I download all my mail off the server in case of events like these. But still! Extreme incompetence carried on to still affect me three years down the line! Loss of data! ARGH!

I am so tempted to just switch to DSL because I am so annoyed with Comcast.

(Also, yes, I have saved the chat transcript to a text file in case they mess up this order, because I am COMPLETELY PARANOID like that.)

(just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you)