My Own Anger at Verizon Scares Me

Our Internet problems have been resolved, but for a few months now our phone line has been statical (I looked it up, and apparently that's the adjective form of static, as opposed to staticky). As the person in charge of bills and utilities in our house, it's my job to look into getting that fixed. I've been putting it off, mostly out of laziness, I guess. I don't use the land line, so the problem isn't in my face. That's my bad. I admit it.

I finally bit the bullet today and called them. It was after 5pm, so I got the routing system. After five minutes on the phone, I am now so filled with rage that I can't work, I can barely think, and I'm wondering what kind of bizarre psychological disorder I have that can possibly cause me to hate Verizon with such an unreasoning, violent hostility. I intended to work until 6 to make up for a long non-work-related conversation I had earlier in the day, but I couldn't do anything but come on this blog and vent.

They make it so hard to take care of problems away from home, which is where I am during the day, because I'm a grown-up and I have a job. This is also when they want you to call.

They want you to conduct all sorts of tests on your own line. Which I can't do from the office, obviously. So I have to go home and put myself through this again, in order to determine if we have to have a guy come out, which we'll have to pay for, because they've tested the line and determined that it's clear. Nothing is ever wrong with the line, even when it's not working.

Maybe it's not laziness on my part. Maybe it's not wanting to have to pay. Or maybe, though my conscious mind had happily forgotten the trauma of late summer, my subconscious remembered how frustrated and angry I was because of this one stupid company. It's consuming. As soon as I heard that woman's recorded voice, I was plunged back into the horror and dysfunction of Verizonland, and I wanted to smash parts of my body into hard objects and scream until she stopped talking and became a person who could help me.

There is something very, very wrong about all this. Some primeval corner of my brain is triggered by these interactions, and I become an angry animal who is no longer capable of understanding anything technical, but is more than capable of chomping on Recording Woman's jugular while she convulses, loses copious amounts of blood and dies, locked in my steel jaws. Not that I've thought about that.

Now the question is whether I should step up and handle this "like a man," do my household job and stop letting my roommates down, and deal with whatever frightening character issue I seem to have dredged up, OR, whether this is obviously too much for me and I should beg one of my roommates to relieve me of the task, because I'm too far gone to be effective, or perhaps just too far gone to interact with Verizon and still hold onto my mental health. I don't know yet. All I know is I hate them. I hate them. I hate them. I hate them. I hate them. I hate them...