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Rats Ate My Internet Again

452 words by attila written on 2013-06-17, last edit: 2016-08-06, tags: mexico, outage, telmex ⋔ Previous post: Rove: NSA surveillance is OK because fictional cops do it on TV shows | The Raw Story ⋔ Next post: McLibel leaflet was co-written by undercover police officer Bob Lambert | UK news | The Guardian

I would like to think that "rats ate my Internet" is a rarely-uttered English sentence. I don't imagine many people have had occasion to use it. It would be even more difficult to imagine someone who has had more than one occasion to use it although one would strongly suspect, after a few minutes of deliberation, that anyone who has ever had occasion to exclaim thus would be more likely to do so again than a normal, non-rat-internet-eating person.

Sadly I had not deliberated. Last year was the first time I ever had a reason to say "rats ate my Internet." It took three weeks from the time our phone line and Internet went dead until the idiots at Telmex managed to fix it and by "fix" I mean "FUCK YOU TELMEX." Okay, they did fix it. Three weeks. THREE. WEEKS.

It has been two weeks now since rats ate our Internet a second time. We have noticed what might be an emerging pattern: both incidents occurred in May, frequently the month when the rains start in earnest here. The story we were told both times by THE MORONS AT TELMEX was that rains apparently forced a mass migration of rats out of the drainpipes of our little town and up towards the surface; several of these rats sought succor in the central switching office the MORONS AT TELMEX maintain ("maintain") here. Apparently these rats decided to eat several important switches, one of which provided hot and cold running Internet to our house. Mostly cold. Mostly running. Mostly.

Until rats ate it. Both times. Then not so much with the running. This time it was two weeks. TWO WEEKS until these idiots managed to fix it. The manager at Telmex spoke to me in a pained and grimaced manner of the decidedly one-way relationship between Telmex and the union to which their MORONS belong. It is impossible to make them do anything. They cannot be fired. And so on. And so forth.

Nonetheless four days after I presented my bearded mug with extreme prejudice in the manager's office in Merida and offered to do something ugly to his desk the MORONS FROM TELMEX made an appearance, got the living shit bitten out of them by mosquitoes (loved that), traced the problem back to the central office in town and discovered the second incursion of masticating rats. Hairy Japanese Bastards.

No, not Japanese. I just love Father Ted. It was kind of a Father Ted moment, if such a thing can happen in 100 degree heat and 98% humidity with a light, hot rain falling in my pants and my eyeballs misting over from the inside.