I was a fairly happy-go-lucky Verizon customer last month,
surfing the ‘Net on its DSL, yacking it up with my daughter on its
wireless service and using its landline to entertain
telemarketers.
Life was good.
I was a fairly happy-go-lucky Verizon customer last month, surfing the ‘Net on its DSL, yacking it up with my daughter on its wireless service and using its landline to entertain telemarketers.
Life was good.
Then May 11, 2006 hit. Call it 5/11. That was the day I picked up a USA Today while visiting dead relatives in Laurel County, Kentucky and learned my government was ogling my telephone records. It was also the day I learned granddaddy Taylor was married four times. The two realizations combined were nearly enough to drive me to quit drinking.
I spent several weeks mulling what Verizon and its cohorts were doing. I was torn between wanting bad guys caught and the indignation over this president tossing aside our Constitution as if it were last week’s fishwrap. If the government believed I was a lawbreaker, and went to a judge and said, “Your honor, this Taylor character is plotting to stuff junk mail into other junk-mail return envelopes and mail them back to the junk-mail companies at enormous cost to those companies, we need to keep an eye on him,” and the judge said, “yep, that fellow’s dangerous,” then by all means, eavesdrop on my telephone calls.
Hell, pilfer through my underwear drawer. I don’t care. Just don’t take the comic books.
But that is not what is happening. It is random, certainly warrantless and positively unAmerican.
I’m reminded of a time as a teenager that I received a speeding ticket. I went before the judge and pleaded with him to let me off because I was going as fast as everyone else.
“Son, you duck hunt?” the judge asked.
“Yessir.”
“Do ya aim at one duck or at the middle of the flock?”
“Well, middle of the flock, I suppose.”
“Well, son, so did that officer, and you were the duck that fell.”
The difference, though, was that I was breaking the law when I was speeding. Now, by virtue of paying Verizon (or AT&T or BellSouth) to carry my voice over its wireless network, I’m being searched without a warrant.
Nope, I decided, we need efficient law enforcement, not sloppy duck hunters that can’t shoot straight. Now we all know what the National Security Agency is doing with our phone records. Measure that against this: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
If it sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. You decide if what Bush and Gonzales are doing is legal. I know it’s unethical.
So I fired Verizon. Fired its DSL service, fired its landline and fired its wireless service. Well, actually I didn’t get to fire them. My wife beat me to it. I was very disappointed. I had my monologue all worked out, complete with references to “Soviet Bloc thugs” and even a sprinkling of “just who do y’all think you are, anyway?” (with my head waggling back and forth).
Instead, my wife (we’ll call her Cindie, since that is what her mother named her) handled it politely and professionally. Do you ever wonder why it’s men who start wars?
But then the hard part begins – figuring out who is going to rewire you. Including my satellite dish, our communications bill was running roughly $230 a month. We simply couldn’t afford that much. So we started doing some comparison shopping. We learned that if we dumped the dish and went with cable, we could get television and broadband Internet for about the same price we were paying Dish for television alone.
Bingo. That takes care of two of the three. And, yeah, I know the horror stories about Charter Communications cable. Believe me, I used to pull my hair out with them when they were known as Falcon Cable.
Some things never change.
When the cable guy showed up two days after he was supposed to, he informed me that the TV works fine, but that I didn’t have a broadband connection. It seems I have a wireless router. It also seems that is a problem for Charter.
“I don’t know nothin’ about wireless,” he explained and promptly left.
Our extra bedroom now looks like the inside of a World War II-era submarine – cables running across the floor and down a baseboard, around a corner and into our office where the laptop is. Whatever, we’re on a budget and it works.
I came into work that Monday and began asking around to colleagues about wireless phone service – service that doesn’t bow down to the Alberto Gonzales school of constitutional law. One of my colleagues (we’ll call him Bill, since that’s what his mother named him)suggested I look at a service called Working Assets (www.workingassets.com).
Very cool outfit. The first thing I noticed is that Working Assets donates 1 percent of its revenue to nonprofit organizations. Trust me, it would be a cold day in Gitmo before Alberto Gonzales would belong to any of these nonprofits.
The second thing I noticed was that it was cheaper than Verizon, and the phones they give you for free are better than the ones Verizon wanted to charge me for after being a customer for half a decade. Yeah, I’m familiar with Verizon’s ad, “It’s the network.” Sorry, but I don’t think a network that includes the NSA is a value added.
Total communications bill in July: $140. Or expressed another way: $230 – $140 = $90 x 12 = $1,080 per year in savings.
Sometimes a little righteous indignation pays off.
