Yesterday, we paid almost $500 to have a tree taken down. Today, the telephone company was trimming trees on the other side of the road, and told The Squire they would have been more than willing to take down our tree, as it was probably tall enough to have presented a hazard if it had fallen across the road.
He didn’t bother to ask them about the River Birch in the middle of the yard.
We had a fairly large locust tree, about five feet from the road, which died a few years ago. This was not a do-it-yourself project, so we hired a local company to come out and cut it down for us. Not a big deal, about two hours, and not as expensive as it might have been, as we have a friend who heats with wood, and will come over to collect the wood and help clean up the debris.
However.
We also have a River Birch which has died, and it is leaning into the electric wires, as well the wires from Comcast. You may remember that our last go-round with Comcast took almost a month to untangle, and we still aren’t happy with the service. (A classic case of getting what you pay for.) We’ve had Comcast for over thirty years, and when it was installed they did not have the technology for the Quick Disconnect box which is now standard, and we need to have somebody come out to handle this in person.
So – The Squire called Comcast and explained what we needed. I heard him say, quite firmly, “No we do not want to terminate the service.” Transfer to another department, and of course, get cut off. Call back and start over. Once again, the woman who answered grabbed the word “disconnect” and tried to talk him out of cancelling the service and then tried to sell him a bunch of upgrades! After some rather sharp conversation, he did finally get Comcast to understand what we need, and they will send somebody out “soon” to install the Quick Disconnect box, so when the tree people come back, we can drop and replace the line ourselves.
One thing which had bugged us ever since The Squire changed our Comcast service was that things seemed so much slower than before it was “improved”. While the second young lady was checking, she found we only had half the speed we were supposed to have, so she said she was going to fix it.
We shall see.
Once that is done, the tree company will coordinate with Baltimore Gas & Electric to take care of that part of things.
One of the workers dropped his “smart phone” while he was here, and The Squire called the tree company to tell them we have it. The silly thing has rung twice, but neither of us can figure out how to answer it! Ain’t it grand?
thisendoftheswamp 