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Internet access restored

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Kawasaki, 2020.04.01

One of the irritants about this little apartment has been the Internet connectivity. The WiFi to 4G gizmo started flaking out on Friday evening. I thought little of it as that's not uncommon in wind and it was blowing pretty hard.

But then on Monday morning there was a total outage. I used my "pocket WiFi" to tell my boss and one of my colleagues, and the colleague told me that I could use the iPhone as I've previously mentioned. But our attempts to work with Oyo - the company that's leased me this place - were the real problem. They ignored all the communications from me, their tenant, and only responded when Mari got involved. Presumably this was because she'd used her email address when registering. It's typical of Japanese bureaucracy to be like this, but for a company that's trying to "do real estate different" in this country I'm not impressed. When I finally got onto the Internet service here by late this afternoon I would have lost two full business days if my employer hadn't had a massive shared data plan for users of its loaner phones.

Hopefully this won't recur.

rand()m quote

It has always seemed strange to me...The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.

—John Steinbeck, Cannery Row