H…how did you know?

…Because they give shitty base­ment apart­ments let­ters instead of numbers.

The new digs are notice­ably larger (approx­i­mately the same floor space, but with fewer rooms), but the entire place has an unrea­son­able funk. There was mildew grow­ing on the sweaty refrig­er­a­tor, there’s a large black clump of mold grow­ing in the air con­di­tioner, and the kitchen cab­i­nets all have freshly-applied ply­wood to the bottom.

It has “severe water dam­age” writ­ten all over it, though I had no choice. I had to take the day off a cou­ple Mondays ago to go apart­ment shop­ping, and it was one of three avail­able on such short notice (the rest taken by col­lege students).

Creepily, while mov­ing out of my old place, a Comcast “home instal­la­tion rep­re­sen­ta­tive” stopped by to pick up my cable modem. I didn’t call for any such “rep­re­sen­ta­tive,” nor did I inform Comcast that I was mov­ing out. I gave him my old-old cable modem, which the last tech­ni­cian for­got to take with him months ear­lier, and kept the newer-old modem to give to the Comcast people.

When I had first moved in, I got the new modem hooked up and every­thing worked fine, with­out even hav­ing to go through Comcast’s bull­shit proxy reg­is­tra­tion thing. So this points me towards one of four narratives:

1. Paranoiac The FBI has me under close scrutiny and was afraid I would dis­cover their hard­ware on my cable modem. The man was an agent sent to recover their equipment.
2. Suspicious Comcast screwed up the proxy setup (aka “break the net­work so you have to pay to unbreak it”) with the par­tic­u­lar firmware revi­sion on the cable modem in ques­tion. This par­tic­u­lar fuck-up slipped past their QA pro­ce­dures, and it was deter­mined that it would be cheaper to sim­ply dis­able the authen­ti­ca­tion proxy for those mod­els than per­form a recall and send their union tech­ni­cians back around to every home which has a cable modem with the offend­ing firmware — which also risks peo­ple dis­cov­er­ing such a flaw and exploit­ing it for free broadband.
3. Smirking The man was a con artist attempt­ing to col­lect rewards offered by Comcast for the return of miss­ing cable modems.
4. Naïve Comcast has help­ful rep­re­sen­ta­tives who cruise the neigh­bor­hoods look­ing for peo­ple who are mov­ing out, so they can get their cable modems back and we don’t get fined.

Unfortunately, because I’d been mov­ing myself and two friends, I didn’t think to try the old cable modem at the new place (just in case it was #2) before I turned it in. The woman at Comcast attempted a “trans­fer” of the old equip­ment first, but could not get it to go through because I had the newer-old modem for less than three months. I asked if I could just keep the modem at the new place and try the trans­fer again in a week (which would have been two days ago), but she wouldn’t give it “back” once she had started the turn-in form on her com­puter. By hand­ing her my newer old modem, I was con­demn­ing myself to wait­ing until next Saturday for their (over­worked) installers to come by my new place.

I real­ize now that we have all become mech­a­nized. Yeah, rants about bureau­cracy are clichéd now, but that does not rob them of their accuracy.