Fallout

I am spending the weekend off-and-on attending the Freaks' annual whole-weekend game foo. Ahh, RECOVERY. Played a single game of Iron Dragon with four others from midnight to 0700. It was my first play of a rail-building board game of any kind; lots of fun. I nearly won, too; everyone was expecting me to win, but Rebecca finished her super-long mega-payoff haul about two turns before I could finish mine. (I would have made it home had not my train gotten derailed twice due to bad luck in the latter few turns. Them's the breaks... but I wonder if the presence of sudden, catastrophic, dumb luck feels a little less welcome to me, in an hours-long strategy game like this.)

Then Rebecca bought us all some filled croissant thingies, so I forgave her. After that I went home to sleep. Probably I will meander back nowish, taking a break at the Mobil station on the way to get my car inspected, as my sticker is now a month behind the times. Bother. I hope that Toyota got the Very Large Check I sent them a week ago today... I told them after they called me on Tuesday that it was en route, and they haven't called me again since then. Since the lease is two weeks past maturity now, and they're very interested in settling the matter, I'll take their silence as a good sign, until the title shows up in my own mailbox. That will be nice.

---

Inspired to check the mail just now. Got a letter from a bill collection agency that AT&T sicced on me months ago, and which I've been ignoring until my recent car-buying adventures. The letter was their response to my telling them that my affairs with AT&T have been settled. Alas, they disagree.

We don't even use AT&T at Minas Morgul; this silly stuff is the result of my own procrastination regarding the fate of the broadband service to the Chestnut Street house. A month or two ago, Carla told me to cancel it (rather than go through the trouble of transferring the account to her name), since she and her housemates got another provider. Here is the current tally:

• I called AT&T to tell them to stop service. A helpful lady said that they'd already taken the liberty because I wasn't paying my bills, but they'd happily take the amount that I had just paid via the Web, apply it to my debt, and mail me back the difference. Indeed, I last week got a bill from AT&T demanding that I remit negative $50. So far, so good.


• Sometime after that, a cable guy showed up at Carla's house and said that he had to disconnect their cable because I was remiss in my bill-paying. Carla's housemate had to convince him that they didn't even use AT&T anymore. (This is, in fact, the case; unlike any other place I've lived, two cable companies' territories somehow overlap through certain parts of the Boston area. Chestnut house, which is within one of these magic zones, now uses RCN.)


• This letter from the collection agency says that they checked, and I still owe AT&T $112.36, and I'd better send them the money right now or I'll get into big trouble.

Sigh. This is the same AT&T, of course, who accidentally didn't charge me at all for the four months I used their broadband service in my first Somerville apartment. Hello, petty karmic payback.

---

This book's post-draft recovery computer game is Fallout 2, which I picked up from Micro Center on Wednesday. I think that its CD is the first Mac OS X-only piece of hard media I have purchased, which is kind of nifty. Even if it is a game that was orginally published for Windows in 1998. New to me.
( computer game blather follows )