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I can not believe this.

After receiving a phone call informing me that my long wait for phone service was officially over, I am now without a telephone again.

At about 2PM (central daylight) I received a call from a telemarketer. At about 3PM my manager sent me an email to inform me that he’d tried to call me, and had been greeted with “bee-DEE-DOO! this line is no longer in service.”

After bouncing between friendly but powerless customer service representatives, I found that my service was not in fact completely installed, and that the service order was never closed. In fact, it was delayed until April 30, when a technician is supposed to make the final splice and enable my service for what will officially be the first time. According to the paperwork at the local telephone service center, the construction at the tap that was necessary to complete our service was only finished today (leaving some sort of minor switch-flipping for Wednesday).

HATE HATE HATE

Salaries at Sapient were never outrageously high (I mean, not for me, or anybody I knew well enough to talk even in rough terms about salaries). Apparently, now they’re not even what they used to be…

From: rOD Begbie (pronounced like American “road” in native dialect)
Subject: [ ] click here to open mail

Hey Dan.

Enjoyed your blurb about your prank at SAPE. Ah, happy days!

rOD.

PS. A whole 45-50 USD a year?

☑ Check here to use phone

Man, memory lane.

Blaque tosses me an IM:

<bq> So, the phone at this desk has a piece of paper taped to the handset, and that piece of paper says, “Check here to use phone.”

My response is, essentially, “Huh?” I mean, it sounds familiar. Should I get the reference? Was it a New Filing Technique strip I’d read and forgotten about?

He responded:

<bq> You moron.
<bq> You wrote that.
<bq> This was your phone.

After some more prodding, it all came flooding back. We were working on a shameless ecommerce site (in a previous life of mine) and were forced to implement a product-view page that would add the product to your cart … if you checked a box. It was a JavaScript hook on a form checkbox that would go and (pop up a window, I think, and) add the product to your cart.

This made my UI-spider-sense tingle so much (not in a good way) that I think I went around the office, tagging everything with little labels: “Check here to open door.” “Check here to flush toilet.” Each label had a small square box leading the text. (Look, I was young and angry! Impetuous youth! And all that.)

It turns out that Blaque is consulting for SAPE again, and—on his last day consulting—is sitting at a desk (actually Tim’s) at One Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA with my old phone at it.

What do you call it when you can’t remember if you really did something yourself, or simply read about it somewhere?