@WheresTheCup? Ask @TayStevens!

Below is the adult movie star, Taylor Stevens.

 

Below is New Jersey Devils coach, Peter DeBoer. He is checking out the scoreboard and trying to manage his team in the Stanley Cup Finals. The Devils have not played well in this series and they appear to be distracted.

Question: What do you think could possibly distract a coach and his team from a championship series?

 

Answer: Someone buying a busty porn star tickets right behind his bench.

   

What body part distracts you the most?

Why I Hate @ATT

As a consumer, I love the platform that a blog gives me.  Although I'll never be viewed as much as a Consumer Reports website or maybe a CNET, I still get my share of readers.  I absolutely hate the "service" given at AT&T.  That, to me, is the most incompetent company I've ever dealt with in my life.  Let me share with you an experience so new readers can understand why I hate AT&T...

I had crappy DSL speeds.  Being a former Bellsouth customer, the maximum speeds for DSL was 3.0 mbps.  That's not very fast.  Even some of the shortest YouTube videos would buffer.  After U-Verse arrived in my area, I figured I'd upgrade to a faster speed.  After all, it's only $5 more per month to upgrade to 12.0 mbps.  That's four times the speed that I currently have.  My Hulu+ videos should pop off of my TV with that kind of speed!

So, I order the equipment.  AT&T offers to install everything for you for $150, but I'm a nerd, so I don't need no stinkin' professional installation.  I get an e-mail after placing my order (Wednesday) that states that my equipment will arrive on Monday.  Alright, cool.  Monday arrives and at 10 AM, The Mrs. calls me at work.  "Hey."

"Hi, how are you?"

"I'm fine, but the internet is down."

"Down?"

"Yes."

The idiots at AT&T disconnected my internet service before I even received my new equipment.  How dumb is that?  Why not wait until the equipment arrives and the person calls in to activate it?  Now my Furious Level is at an 8 (it pretty much stays on a 6 year around for AT&T).  The Mrs. calls AT&T to see what's going on and she gets a recording.  "If you're equipment has not arrived, please press 2," says the recording.

She presses 2 and the recording gives her the number to UPS.  LOL!  Really?  You cut off our internet servive and then throw UPS under the bus?  Anyhoo, the equipment arrives around 530 PM and The Mrs. takes everything out of the box.  Keep in mind that AT&T "offered" professional installation for $150.  We plugged in the DSL filter to the phone jack, plugged in the power to the modem, registered online and were up and running in 10-15 minutes.  And they were going to charge $150 for that?  A rip off!  I know there are some non-confident or eldery people not capable of understanding how these things work, but to charge them $10 per minute for something that easy is criminal!  That's easily a $40 job on the high end.  I personally wouldn't charge a customer even that since AT&T had already charged me a $100 "activation fee" just for signing up for their upgrade.

I hate AT&T.  I flat out hate the level of "service" they provide.  Just like the government, they have so many divisions and branches that one doesn't know what the other is doing.  I was told less than two months ago that I didn't have U-Verse in my area by a BellSouth agent.  I went online and chatted with an AT&T rep last week and found out that it's been in my area for almost two years.  This is what happens when you become so large of a company that you don't even know what the left hand is doing because it's too far gone from the right.

I use AT&T not because I want to, but because I have to.  The only other provider in my area is Comcast and from what my co-workers tell me, their service goes down more than a Kardashian at a sporting event.  So, I'm stuck with AT&T. (Sigh)  And to top it all off, my internet download speeds that are supposed to be "up to 12 mbps" have yet to even cross 7.0 mbps.  I'm not even getting 75% of the speeds that they promised!  When I had 3.0 mbps, I consistently got between 2.5 and 2.8.  Now I can't even get 8.0 mbps?

If I didn't still have friends working there who need their jobs, I'd go straight to my local news station with this.

 

Dealing with Death

I know that I've been missing from my blog and social networks for a while.  It just wasn't a focus of mine over the past week or so.  My mom passed away at 130 AM on June 2nd.  She had been battling multiple myeloma for a couple of years now.  She was in and out of the hospital over the past few months, but she checked in, for the last time, the day after Mother's Day.

It was within a week that we learned that it was pretty much a waiting game.  We didn't know when, but we knew that death was inevitable and that the doctors could do no more.  Although it was painful to watch my mom fade with each passing day, things were made a bit easier to know how many people loved her.  She had tons of visitors and got to benefit from the love from so many people whose lives she had touched over the years.

To me, that was the true meaning of a legacy.  A legacy isn't leaving children behind or having some statue built in your honor.  A legacy is leaving people with a part of you that they will keep with them forever.  My mom passed away with family at her side and that's what anyone should want.  Not some phone call saying something unexpected happened, but to be able to actually say "goodbye."

I feel a sense of pride of how wonderful of a lady she was based on all of the people who have come by to visit my dad.  How could one person have touched so many lives in 69 years?  I know that the strength and pride that I feel today will stay with me after the funeral.  The services on tomorrow will be "closed casket" at my mom's request, so yesterday's viewing at the funeral home was my last time seeing her.  The tears I shed on yesterday were not because I was feeling sorry for myself or asking "why?"  They were tears of gratitude of me saying "thank you."  "Thank you" for keeping me in line when I was a child and for never stop being my mother after adulthood.  Even though I'm dealing with death, the memories of the life lessons that you taught will still guide me going forward.

I ask that my readers understand that I don't plan on responding to any comments on this post although I do appreciate them.  I need to get past this feeling I've had.  It's not healthy.  After a few days of feeling lost, I'm slowly returning back to my everyday self.  That's what my mom would have wanted.  For me to be me.  For me to be the strong one and to take care of my grandmother and my father.  To do that, I have to have the strength to move on...

...And Momma didn't raise no punk.