As I’m in my new apartment, a few days ago I got my phone line cut over from my old place.
Now, whenever you do this (or pretty much anything else with NTT), they tell you that you should be in the building in case they need to do wiring work. Of course this is a safety net for them, and I’ve never had anyone turn up, but this time an NTT engineer did turn up. He was a nice guy too, chatty but polite (usually they’re a bit miserable), had a photo on his business card for security and generally seemed keen on the job.
He also had a tool belt with a hammer, screwdriver and a few other bits and pieces and generally looked the part. However, he then asked me for my phone unit, which I’d cleverly left in a packing box, but which I then managed to fish out. Of course I’d packed the handset in a different box as you do because they’re so bulky, so it took me another five minutes to find that too.
I asked if he could test it with his test rig (the phone/line tester/handset most telecoms people I know usually have with them) and he breathed in through his teeth and hit the familiar ‘chotto‘, which is usually followed by a ‘muzukashii‘ for ‘it’s a difficult [situation]’, but this was left in a hanging ‘chotto’ which I took to mean ‘I forgot it’, but rather than leave it at that, whilst I was checking the corners of the few remaining unpacked boxes for my errant handset, he continued to breathe through his teeth and breathe out heavily, so there I am looking at him doing a Darth Vader impression, and I can’t help thinking that hammer on his tool belt looks a bit like a light saber … or maybe I need some sleep.
Before anyone questions that hammer by the way, I see no problem with *any* technician carrying a hammer. If you can’t fix a problem, hit it with a hammer, if that doesn’t fix it, get a *bigger* hammer. Or a light saber maybe in this case.
So there it is, NTT employ the Sith because they’re good with telecommunications which is probably a good sideline to have in these uncertain times. If they employed Jedi they’d have to send two people to each job, because we all know how the Jedi only attack in pairs, (like women going to the ‘rest room’ at a nightclub) with the honourable exception of Yoda-chan. I’m thinking of changing my line to ADSL again (not needed here as the building has Hikari Fiber) to see if a guy turns up with suspicious horns claiming ‘soon we will have more bandwidth than cable TV, soon we will have our revenge’.