“Hello! This is Fingerf*** calling for... Mischa Barton—”

    “00000000000000000.”

    “If this is spouse of... Mischa Barton—”

    “00000000000000000.”

    “If you know... Mischa Barton—”

    “00000000000000000.”

    “One moment while I transfer you. . . .”

    Waiting on the phone to speak to another person about me not being someone whose name sounded like Mischa Barton, I could not help but think that if Mischa Barton were here I would be handing her a sandwich, not the phone. I am not sure which she would recoil from more in this case.

    The muzak clicked off. “Hello, this is James from Fingerf***. Am I speaking with Mischa Barton?”

    “No, James, you are not, and you never will if you keep calling me.” I had been practicing my technically-not-a-threat dialogue.

    “Is Mischa Barton there?” he asked doggedly.

    “The last I saw her, she was in the O.C., but she died in a car wreck, or of anorexia, I don’t remember which. Very sad.”

    “Excuse me?”

    I hung up then, having long since given up explaining that Mischa Barton no longer had my “new” number from Time Warner Cable. It had been about a week and two hundred calls, so many that I had been forced to disable call waiting to stop the incessant beeping when I was on the phone. That had been part of another unpleasant conversation.

    “This is Time Warner Cable, how can I help you?”

    “I just got my phone and I’m getting called by banks, credit card companies, and debt collection agencies for—”
    “Hello? Hello? Is anybody there?”

    “Yes, I’m here, hello!”

    “Sir, I can barely hear you.”

    “That’s because I’m using your wretched phone service.”

    “My screen shows your calling on a cell phone.”

    “Stop looking at your screen and listen to me. I need a new number. I’ve been bombarded with calls from banks, credit card agencies, and debt collection agencies for whoever owned this number before.”

    “Sir, you need to contact the national Do-not-call Registry to stop telemarketers—

    “Listen to me! I’m getting calls for the previous owner of this number. That’s why I need a new number, understand?”

    “Yes, sir. Time Warner Cable charges $25 to change your number.”

    “What? I have to pay $25 to get a new number because the number I got a week ago is being swarmed by creditors for someone else?”

    “Yes sir.”

    “How much do you suppose AT&T will charge me for a phone number after I invoke the money-back guarantee and cancel my service with Time Warner Cable?”

    Pause.

    “Well?”

    “Time Warner Cable can credit you the fee on a future bill for this one time only.”

    “Tell that to Mischa Barton—if you can find her!”

    If only it was that easy. While AT&T did make it easy enough to sign up for phone and DSL, the truck parked on the street with the yellow backhoe, and its grinning, hungry-looking shovel did not look easy.

    “So, wait, you have to dig up two hundred feet of the property to install a phone line? In 2009?”

    “Yep. And that’s just from the junction box to the house, the line from the loop to the junction box is dead, just dead. Have to test all of it. Could be a week or so.”

    If that conversation sounds insane, it was a step up from the one I had with AT&T the coverageless wireless service we stopped getting after we moved to our new place.

    “But your coverage map shows I’m in a good place with 3G, too.”

    “Well, about those maps,” said the AT&T engineer I had finally managed to speak with after five or six scripted not-engineers. “You see, that map is not actually a physical representation of coverage in every location, just mathematical models sometimes. Of course, now we can add your data point.”

    The Benjamin Disraeli quote made famous by Mark Twain about statistics came to mind along with a few choice epitaphs, but I held back. “But I don’t understand what the problem is. The terrain is flat, we live less than 20 miles from the center of Raleigh.”

    “A lot of tall trees on your property?”

    “Well, yeah.”

    “It’s possible that could be it.”

    AT&T: more bars in more places, except where there’s foliage.

    I stopped holding back, and while I felt better it didn’t solve the problem.

    Faced with burning two acres of wood and/or myself to the ground, I was resigned to becoming Mischa Barton’s answering machine with Time Warner Cable’s digital phone. And the my Dark Savior ascended from below. Seeking to cover the holes in their wireless coverage map without actually doing anything, AT&T rolled out 3G MicroCell in my area.

    AT&T: five bar coverage in your home. For $150. We are bastards, after all.

    Like Apple products, except ones upgraded to Snow Leopard in my house—it just works! Just plug the femtocell into the cable modem, and it will steal Time Warner’s bandwidth for crystal clear calls on the iPhone that is the only reason to be an AT&T wireless customer. Of course, being from AT&T, the 3G MicroCell doesn’t play well with others. You can either configure it to prioritize itself over other broadband and have your downloading speeds throttled to 1999 ISDN levels, or lay off the torrents during the day.

    Still, it’s better than being Mischa Barton’s bitch.