...Would love for you assholes to lure some of these corporate dicks to HS....

Qwest has a lot of problems; the only good thing I can say about them is that they didn’t cooperate with our fascist government’s scheme to monitor all phone calls and Internet traffic.  Their connection disk doesn’t work for Apples, their tech support doesn’t know how to guide Apple owners through the connection process, they sold me a defective modem that had to be replaced, it took many calls to get them to replace a defective line into the house, and even now, my connection is sometimes dropped or slows down below dial-up speed.  They are so stupid, they tested the connection repeatedly to the box on the street and said it was fine.  It was only when I threatened to cancel that they sent someone to test the buried line from the box to the house and determined that it had gone bad.  Before this, their tech support tried to get me to disassemble the cable TV outlet and told me my microwave oven might be the problem.  I think this company consists solely of a billing department; everything else is contracted out.  Often when my signal slows down, I go to an online testing service which averages test results and ranks companies by reliability.  I would like to think their ranking dropped because of me.

They contract out the TV portion of their service to Direct TV.  The dish was blown out of position with the first windstorm that occurred after it was installed.  A second contract technician had to come out to brace it properly.  They carry no French TV channels, but their customer service suggested Mandarin TV as a possible substitute.  It pisses me off that if I wished to keep up and improve my Spanish, I have a choice of free Spanish channels to watch, but would have to pay for French TV if it were available.

pALEPHx wrote:

But I digress. Fnord, you want to learn Spanish why, so you can speak to landscapers, maids, and the people who cook your food at restaurants? Despite having great-grandparents emigrating from Argentina, and taking Spanish courses all the way through my sophomore year of college, I will rarely, if ever, let it be known that I understand it. Imported Phoenicians do NOT speak "good" Spanish, yet they'll deride you for trying. It's the only thing they've got, I 'spose.

I took two years of Spanish and French in college.  There was a time when I thought it might be useful to be able to communicate with imported Phoenicians.  I'm more interested in improving my French because I’m partially of French descent, I’ve traveled to France many times and I’m often spoken to in French at home.  Like you, I don’t let on that I understand much of what the Phoenicians are saying and I refuse to attempt to communicate with them in their language.