I live in a rather new “condo” complex… I use the term condo loosely, because although condos is in the name of the complex, they are still apartments.  Yuppy bastards.  Anyway, after living in the ghetto that is The Rivera, which was kinda dumpy when my mom went to BYU, in the early 1970s, I decided that I have to live somewhere nice for the rest of my college experience.

Now this complex does fall into the “nice” category, maybe even “very nice”, we have a washer and dryer in our apt, which i would pay 500 dollars a month just to have.  Having a washer and dryer in my apartment allows me to wash my clothes every few days, instead of going through every single item of clothing I own, and only washing them once a month.  That trek I had to take at The Riv with 100 pounds of clothing to the coin operated washing machines, really wasn’t too fun.

My experience with management so far hasn’t been too delightful.  My apartment manager’s first spoken language is not English, so the language barrier is definitely there.  Andrew and I seriously doubted if we would every get into this complex in the first place because just trying to get information we needed from them was a major hassle.  Since then all has be straightened out, and we still don’t have our other two roommates.  Nothing major to complain about in that area now.

One thing to complain about though would have to be the shitty free cable and free “high speed” internet we have.  The free internet they offer travels at the speed of 128k, or twice as fast as old school DIAL UP internet.  What a sweet deal huh?  The fastest speed, a whopping 1 megaBIT, goes for 50 dollars a month. FIFTY DOLLARS!  Back in Texas we got SWBell internet for 23 bucks a month, and it was 3mb.  Going from 3mb to 1mb feels like I’m using dial up again.  HORRIBLE!

Now on to the cable.  When I first moved in, we had just your basic cable.  Minus TNT and Fox Sports Net and the sound on some of the channels didn’t even work.  One of the channels that didn’t have sound was KJZZ, which shows Utah Jazz games, so basically I would only be getting half of their games on TV, and they would be SILENT! YES!  (If you are wondering why I would be even interested in watching a Utah Jazz game, it’s because I went to high school with Deron Williams)  And no TNT?  So that would mean, no 40 games in 40 nights when NBA playoffs start, no Saved, no “Dun Dun” during those 8 hours of Law and Order everyday.  Basically, how could hell be any worse than my life at that moment.

This is how.  My apartment hired a satellite guy to install DISH NETWORK! TOTALLY AWESOME RIGHT? No, you’re wrong.  First of all, we didn’t have ANY satellite for the first 4 days.  When I tried to call and authorize our receiver, they couldn’t do anything without the account number.  So I go talk to the office and they give me a number to the Satellite guy, I call him, gives me a number to commercial dish network, and they offer me no help because apparently our receiver isn’t on the apartment list.  I call satellite guy back, he says he’ll handle it.  24 hours later, I wake up and we have a new screen on our tv, saying the satellite signal is lost.  Apparently it cannot acquire it, because the satellite guy must have taped the dish on top of our apartment complex.  So now I get one frame of tv every two minutes.  Even Provo cable is better than this.
Tight.