In spite of their dubious business practices, like raising their rates just for the fun of it, we’ve been a customer for years. Mainly for the internet. It’s been very reliable and the service hasn’t been all that bad.

Until last week.

Then things got interesting.

Apparently, the root cause of our newly acquired dislike of Xfinity is that we had two accounts. One at our old Hill House on the hill, and now one at the Cricket House. We inherited the Cricket House account when Diane’s Mom passed away last year but we didn’t change anything until this year. That’s when we had Xfinity remove Mom’s home phone # from her account and replace it with our house phone # from the Hill.

The was a bit of confusion that required a bit of explaining, more than a few times, which should have prepared us for the most recent incident.

To understand the process I’m compelled to do my best to explain how they can do that with phone numbers. I must take you back in time to 1989. That’s when we acquired our home phone number.

Back then we actually needed a home phone so we could communicate because cell phones weren’t widely used. They were big bulky things and really not all that convenient at the time. So, we signed up with Qwest, a phone company that’s now just a figment of most people’s imagination and were assigned 397-5701. Yes, it was that short because back then the area code wasn’t necessary. Each town was identified by the first three numbers; 397 was St. Helens, 543 was Scappoose, and 556 was Rainier. Pretty simple.

Then everyone started moving out of California to Oregon, and other places, and the phone companies started running out of numbers. I have to admit that the info I’m sharing may only be partially true because I’m relying on things that happened 30 years ago, just so you know.

Once our number was made available at our first home after retiring from the Navy turned out to be quite popular with folks from all over the United States and some foreign countries. It previously belonged to a gentleman who was well known in the cock fighting circles so we got all these calls looking for the guy. It took a long time to let all his old friends know that he was no longer among the living and they would have to find another source of information like they used to get from the deceased.

Things were fine for a long time then we moved from Columbia City to St. Helens and Qwest sent a guy to make sure 397-5701 would ring at our new home. It worked the first time and continued working for the next 15 years, or so. During that time we got cable TV from Comcast, might of had internet from them, too. but Quest and CenturyLink showed up in there somewhere. I remember when we had Quest my email address was jerrie@q.com. I thought that was pretty cool, but things change.

Then we moved to the Hill House and having faster internet seemed to be necessary. Since CenturyLink’s internet was slow, we got Comcast. It served us well in spite of unplanned outages and unexplained rate hikes.

If anyone reading this can figure out what went on with my narrative, please let me know because I’m not going to reread this to verify. I think I would find it very confusing. Also, if you took the time to read this far, thank you very much.