Utilities would be so...useful.

Just spent an hour at the phone company. I finally got the information I needed for the guy who contacted me a week ago, and we exchanged half a dozen text messages last night (with varying degrees of success), and he even tried to stop by, but it was dark and he was afraid there might be dogs in the cul de sac, so he didn't make it all the way to the door.

We determined that the next thing was for me to go in and sign something, which I did, but he wasn't completely ready for me when I got there. Eventually I signed about eight things (returning each of the various portions of my deposit on the initial application, and then re-paying them for the new one), and he gave me a new work order to post in the window, and photocopied my ID and...well, that's it.

There's really no telling whether his desire to make things right will result in the work actually being done any sooner than if I'd just gone down and put in the application today, but I'm sure he's doing all he can.

I'm going to go ahead and assume that my initial application did in fact get lost in the shuffle because in addition to telling me to go to the employees' entrance and ask for him (rather than waiting in the half-block long line for the public entrance), when I did that, and he came out to help me, he gave me nine little corporate notepads "so you can write down phone numbers."

Anyway. Presumably it's now properly applied for. We'll see when it actually gets installed (the good sign is that, as always, the phone company installers are out in force today, and still working a couple blocks west of the new place, but moving, as the days go by, in that general direction.)