I just had a phone call from a lovely girl in Eircom.

She wanted to know how my phone was working out.

I pointed out that she was phoning me on my phone, so it was working fine, thank you very much for asking.

She apologised and said that what she meant was my phone bills.  Was I happy with them?

Now, I don’t know of anyone who is happy to get a bill for anything, but she was only doing her job so I told her that I was very happy with my bills, and really looked forward to receiving them.

She then told me that broadband was available in my area.

I knew this, because my neighbour is always complaining about how crap it is.

I asked her the details anyway, because I was in a reasonable mood, and I wanted her to feel happy in her job.

She told me the prices, and I was impressed.  Actually, I was very impressed.  The way she told it, I could get over twice my current speed for half the price, which is a nice offer.

So I asked her about caps.

She brightened up even more and told me about their very generous caps on the amount I can download per month.

I then confessed that I already had broadband, and that I had no cap at all.  I can download as much as I like and I don’t have to worry about it.  In fact, this summer, I hope to download the Internet onto my computer and burn it onto a DVD so that I never need to go on-line again.

She was a bit disappointed at my lack of capping, but pressed on about the charges and how much cheaper Eircom would be.

I asked her about upload speeds.

That was a mistake for her, as it is something that they don’t advertise too strongly.

She rooted around in her papers, apologised a couple of times and finally announced that they could offer me 384 Megabytes  upload speed.  I was impressed.  I queried it.  She got flustered and admitted she meant 384 Kilobytes.

“Kilobits,” says I.

She got flustered again.  “Is there a difference?”

I explained that there is a factor of eight difference, and that in fact she was offering me 64 Kilobytes upload speed.

She decided to change the subject and started telling me about their generous upload allowances at so many Gigabytes per month.  I explained that I had no limits at the moment.

She offered me a free e-mail address.

I explained that I already had about a hundred e-mail addresses and that any more would only confuse me.

She finally copped on that I was quite happy with my current service.  I told her that the information she had given me was very useful and that I would keep it on file in case I felt like changing over.  This cheered her no end, and she gave me her private number “just in case”.

I added her number to my little Red Book.

But don’t you hate it when you phone someone and get a real fucking smartarse on the other end?