It all started rather innocently, really. I had decided after the second mugging in as many weeks on Hooper, the Slug Brooklyn Office was going to have to relocate. Plus with the addition of Chapel Hill transfer Gene Slacks, our place was becoming no less a panic box than a place to lay your head. After one more round with our now legendary confrontations with classic Brooklyn slumlord Simcha-choo(1), we decided to move to the Italian part of Williamsburg(2)

So after kissing our deposit good-bye, we packed up the ol’ slug and took the show on the road. Unfortunately, this also meant moving our computer network from one venue to another. Ye gods, I had to call Verizzzon, a task I would not wish upon any of my enemies. But call I did, and my trip to the heart of corporate darkness began.

See Verizzzon in New York is uncatergorically the worse ran business on the face of the planet. I can imagine a troop of drunk monkeys running an international arms cartel(3) before I can imagine these yahoos doing something right the first time.

So I called them expecting it to be easy as pie since I was only moving five blocks away, even staying on the same Cisco switch. No reinitialization would even be needed. Of course changing Hooper to Metropolitan proved too much for them, and my order was lost. But of course I didn’t realized this until three weeks when my order was suppose to activated nothing happened. And since I was using Netzzzero(4), I wanted it ASAP, especially since they kept charging for the DSL I was not getting.(5)

So I called in(6) and asked what was up. They of course told me to hang on hold for a while, because my call was important to them. They kept telling me I could just email using my username the issue about why my dsl was not working. The paradox here was mind-boggling. If I was able to send then email, why would I be calling to say it was not working? I wonder how many fools fell for that one. Not this guy to say the least.

So I finally got a guy on the line who refused to admit that there was ever an order to move my DSL from one location to another. He promised he was sincere about the mix up, all for probably 5.75 an hour. He put in a new order and told me to wait for three more weeks and it would be ready. I asked if there was anyway to expedite it since they dropped the ball originally. I was basically told to fuck off.

So I went and tried to find a second reseller of DSL in my area while I waited out the three weeks, since my company loyalty to Darth Vader was over. This is where the story finally gets interesting. See, I found out a few things they are not telling us:

1. Verizzzon(7) Phone and Verizzzon DSL are NOT, I repeat, are NOT the same company(8).
2. You do NOT have a choice when it comes to DSL in certain parts of the Northeast. Even if you do not go through Verizzzon, you are going through on of their resellers. In my book I call that a smokescreen monopoly.
3. They fired a lot of their key technical people about six months ago. Oddly enough I happen to know one of them and even HE cannot get Verizzzon to give him DSL in a timely matter.

In my book this is fraud, like how Dell’s Tech Support is actually outsourced yet they claim them as part of their company.(9) If a company makes a claim through branding, shouldn’t they have to hold their end of the bargain? If Verizzzon Phone and DSL are not the same company then how come they are allowed to present themselves to the public as a single entity? Isn’t that false advertisement? I asked their corporate mouthpieces this and they replied they were technically owned by a parent company to both and were sister corporations. When asked what the parent company was, the flow of information came to an abrupt stop. Needless to say, the Verizzzon cartel had a firm grip not on the public knowledge of their rather shady dealings, but of the backbone of broadband. I was flat out fucked and waited out my three weeks like a good little minion. Then things got ugly.

On the prescribed date by Verizzzon themselves, of course there was no DSL. I called them and began a ride that has technically not even ended yet today. See they forgot to close my other order so they never issued a new one. I asked if they could cancel it and get me going they said sure, in three weeks again. No way I thought. So I cancelled it and immediately escalated the call. I was told basically I had no option and to sit and wait like a good serf. They had never dealt with a slug.

So I called and pretended to want some big business package for Salt for Slugs. They were happy as shit, and I was able to get the number of corporate communications from them since I was press. The game was on.

After talking to a guy Ill only call Deep Throat because he was so cool and obviously aware of the problems within his own companies, I got my order expedited. This was only after I threatened and I guess completed the task(10). This got me to thinking about what chance an average user has, none.

The best part has yet to come in my dealings to their bureaucracy. So Deep Throat canceled the order that would have taken a few more months and got into a special place they call Appeals(11). They actually got my DSL flowing to my house but never gave me a new password. I called in to get but was told that since, get this, my account was simultaneously cancelled and closed, working but not open, they could not reset the password from where they were. I would have to go to Appeals, who had sent me to them to get it done, but since Appeals was a database that was down they could not update it till the techs changed my password… It only gets more confusing after that.

After some soul searching, a drink, and a few hits from my friends Mr. Burbly-Boo(12), I called back and got it all worked out after a few hours on the phone. After seven weeks I was able once again to bring the slug web empire back on-line. Now all I have to sort out is how they continued to charge me the entire time it was down. Their response was I should have told them I were not connected. I told them about the repeated calls to the tech and appeals department, but the lady said I had to call the billing the department to inform them that the other department had not notified them. What the fuck? Are you suggesting that in order to be a customer of the two-headed beast that is Verizzzon, I must also know your internal policies? They were.

This got me to thinking about how much corporation’s policies and procedures take up our time as individuals. Think for a second about the effort and will these faceless organizations have pulled out of your soul. From the gas company, to mind-numbing shit at the grocery store, to simple things like getting stamps, they work as a group. To what end you ask? Since we have conquered as a people the need to gather and hunt, we should be enjoying a golden era of mankind. To distract us from the universal truth, they have supplied media and corporate bureaucracy games to keep us occupied.

In 1886(13), corporations were given the same rights as private individuals under the constitution of these United States. This was the seed of our destruction. Well that and the concept of “limited liability.” See, the way the game works for them is that corporations are never held accountable for their actions on the shareholder level. It’s like gambling except when you lose they don’t take your money away. Or if you happen to destroy a shoreline like Exxon, you are still allowed to exist.

A charter is a corporation's legal permit to do business. Up until 100 years ago, the charters of out of control corporations were routinely revoked. The only reason we do no do this anymore because the thought it was possible has left the collective unconscious and pop culture. The only reason, again I keep saying this to drive the point home, they are allowed to act like this is because we allow them to, not because it’s a inherent law of nature.

Now here is where I get on the soapbox. We has a species are at a crossroad. To our left is where we give up democracy and liberty in pursuit of a corporate state. To our right is a golden era of which our kind has never seen. The funniest part is a war will not be needed, or at least a battle of the conventional kind. It will be a war over consciousness.

Let’s start small and get big. Though we have left the gold standard so the banking cartel can use imaginary money to suppress the third world, this was how the man got to be the man, by hording gold. The funny thing about gold is that ten thousand years ago it was worth as much monkey shit. It was only when one tribe member convince another that the shiny rock was intrinsically worth more than the non-shiny rock, did we start journeying down this path. It was a con game to begin with, and is a con game to this day. Gold is not worth anymore than a slab of clay, unless we agree with the powers that be it is. Once you are able to make this leap of logic, you can picture how wild the world is today.

Today we are rely on corporation and banks to tell us how much money is worth. This is like letting the wolf guard the chicken hut. Since they also control the amount of money in the system, they can create inflation and depression at their whim. Of course, at the center of all this once again, is that we allow them to do so because we believe in the value of the fictitious money they are generating. If it were leaves, we’d stuff them in our pants, but instead they are slips of paper.

The next time you hand someone a dollar think about what is really going on there. Why does this piece of paper allow you to do what you are doing? At what cost to the evolution of mankind are we effectively putting into motion by allowing monopoly money generated by malicious corporations and banking cartels to control our lives?

And when are you gonna step up to the plate and say, after all these years of civilization, this was the best we can do? The best we can do?

1 Simcha-choo is my affection name for the worst landlord on the face of the planet. Besides his fetish to come into our apartments when we were not there, he would fuck you over ever way possible while cutting every corner, too. His solution to fixing the leak in the shower above us was to cut a three-foot hole in our ceiling so it would drip into our bathtub. Obvious to a normal person this was not acceptable, but to Simcha-choo it was a 8-month fix. Along with that we dealt with a sink that was free standing in the bathroom and prone to falling down, paper thin walls that kept neither the cold or the sound of the ice cream trucks that circled us like sharks 24/7. He’s named developed out of my thinking he would be the ultimate annoying Pokeman, Smicha-choo I choose you! I choose you to pretend not to speak English when I want something fix. I choose you to never take a bath and then stand next to me so I can smell the meat decaying on your brown and broken teeth. I choose you to lie to me about the silliest things, like what day it is. Most of all, I choose you to be found in a barrel somewhere in a stockyard in Jersey. A slug can dream. (back)

2. It will always amaze me how you can walk three blocks in a neighborhood in Brooklyn and be in a different country. When I left Little Puerto Rico to the Italian part, I noticed the distinct lack of trash on the streets, chaos, cats and dogs living together, and bullshit of daily life back there. I had become so desensitized I would think nothing of a kid with a bloated belly drinking a 40 on a school day afternoon. Once you lose your basis of what you deem normal, you are on a slippery slope indeed. It took me a month to unwind from living there, but was nursed back to help from the midnight tacos of the loco burrito, which had better Spanish food than in little rico, go figure. (back)

3. Monkeys or our president, you make the call. (back)

4. Netzerrro is a classic example of getting what you pay for my friend. We tried our damnest to use the one who were suppose to be the freedom fighters. What we got were random lock ups and inability to use our own SMTP server. When we called to complain that their overlay program was fucking us up, they said it would be a 9.95 credit card charge to talk to the tech. So basically they program in bugs that require you to pay them to fix, nice. Just for the record, it would lock up using just the Explorer shell and hard freeze to where you had to reboot every time. When you have to call and pay to have it work, it is not technically free is it? (back)

5. This took me awhile to figure out cuz they were charging me for Calling Card Charges, and since I do not have a calling card, I was a bit confused. After calling to ask about it, they said that was normal. Normal in whose world is the question I guess. (back)

6. One of the few redeeming qualities of Verizzzon is they employed James Earl Jones as their spokesperson. (back)

7. The three zzz in Verizzzon is a symbol of how much they are asleep on the job. (back)

8. This is straight from the mouth of one of their corporate communications people. I won’t mention his name because he was such a hell of a nice guy. (back)

9. Current outsourcing locales of note: Las Vegas and Beaverton, Oregon, home of Dell’s pimp Intel. (back)

10. Completing a task was something they really were able to do, so I guess I’m better than them. (back)

11. I would commonly refer to the Appeals for Sanity division. (back)

12. Just for those in the know, Jerome Baker is a god. If your clutz around the dinger ringer of blue smoke, I highly suggest his product line. (back)

13. 1886 US Supreme Court ruling in a railbed dispute titled Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad. The ruling held that a private corporation was a "natural person" entitled to all the rights and privileges of a human being, Even at it’s time it was known as the worse legal decision ever, and today we are dealing with the results. (back)