After 20 years of owning the same landline phone number, I’m finally biting the bullet and getting rid of my home phone. Even though my kids and I have had cell phones for years, I hung on to that damn landline thinking it would be my saving grace if the satellites ever went out and I had to get in touch with my kids. Never mind the fact my kids wouldn’t have phones that worked, so what good would my precious landline be?
Levelheaded people pointed out the flaw in my logic several times, but I still insisted on keeping that stupid landline just in case. Because I knew in the event of an apocalypse my kids would comb the war-torn, radioactive barren landscape in search of a pay phone to call home. Provided they could figure out how to use a pay phone…which would be a challenge since it’s about as foreign to them as an 8-track tape.
But then Century Link got the bright idea to charge me nearly $90 a month to bundle a home phone we never use (except to field unsolicited calls) with crappy Internet service that downloads at a banana slug’s pace of 2.3 Mps and uploads somewhere in the 0.57 range.
I think paint dries faster.
So I have Utah Broadband coming out on Tuesday to hook up some sort of tin foil space hat on top of my house and I’m going to pay them about half as much for Internet access that’s six times faster. And once that happens my old-time Park City 649 prefix number is going the way of the Sony Walkman.
A Wifi to Remember
But the best thing about getting new Internet access is that my teenage son, Quinn, and I get to come up with a new wifi name. Quinn told me about a post he read on iFunny, where someone named their wifi “HackIfYouCan.” Unfortunately the next time this person tried to hop on the Web he’d found his wifi had been renamed to “ChallengeAccepted,” which was hysterical except for the fact he couldn’t use the Internet access he’d paid for.
We’re not going to be quite so cheeky as to invite hackers, however we do want to give our wifi a bit of character. When I asked Quinn what we should name our Internet jumping off point, he suggested “BitchGitYerOwnWifi.” True, this gets to the heart of why our wifi is password protected, but it’s not very neighborly. So I put the kibosh on “BitchGitYerOwnWifi.”
Then he came up with “newderections,” but when I pointed out he spelled “directions” wrong, he gave me a sly grin, and said “Say it out loud, Mom.” I did, and after repeating it once I got it, laughed, and told him to forget it.
We wracked our brains for a solid 20 minutes when I should’ve been working and he should’ve been doing anything other that composing silly-ass wifi names with his mom. Between the two of us we came up with this fine list of potential wifi monikers:
- WifindYourOwnWifi?
- NoFreeWifiInParkGhettos
- CantTouchThis…wifi
- DontEvenThinkAboutIt
- FuhgittaBoutIt
- NothingToSeeHereMoveAlong
- KeepItDownWeCanHearYou
- Porn?WhatPorn?
- ImOnTheWebOnlyForTheArticles
- MyComputersOnCrack
- VirusesRUs
- UnplugAndReadABook
- GetALife
He also offered 8====D. Hmm. Let me think about this for just a nanosecond…um, no. I told him if I didn’t go for “BitchGitYerOwnWifi,” why in the World Wide Web would I endorse a keyboard induced phallic symbol? Save it for your very first stand-up comedy routine, kid. I may be a cool mom, but I’m not that cool.
So we’ll keep adding to the list until the Utah Broadband guy comes on Tuesday. We may already have a winner or that perfect flash of brilliance may not have surfaced yet. Could be it will come to one of us when we least expect it. Like in the middle of World Civ class for him or during an important meeting of some sort for me. So if you’re telling me your latest adventures in the produce section of the grocery store, and all of a sudden I get a wild-eyed look and start taking notes on a cantaloupe, it’s not necessarily that I find you enormously fascinating. (No offense.) It could be that I’m adding “ThisHotSpotDontItch” to the list.
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Stacy Dymalski is an award winning keynote speaker and stand-up comic who gave up the glamorous life of coach travel, smokey comedy clubs, and heckling drunks for the glamourous life of raising kids (who happen to be bigger hecklers than the drunks). This blog is her new stage. For more of Stacy’s comedy check out her book Confessions of a Band Geek Mom available in bookstores and on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.