Underpromise, then it looks like you are overperforming

So I get a call today that a Telus dude thinks he can fix my internets without me even being home. You know, like gets my hopes up and whatnot. Then he calls back and says he could not, in fact, fix it from the outside, so I'll still have to wait 'til Saturday. And then I'm like all sad and stuff.

Later in the afternoon, I get a call from another Telus dude who says he can be at my place in half an hour and can I get there?¹ Fortunately, this was around 3:45pm² and what I was working on could be done at home, so I grabbed my work and booted it home, arriving just as the Telus dude arrived. So I let him in, profusely apologizing for the messiness of my apartment³, making a surreptitious check around my bedroom to make sure I haven't left anything too incriminating lying around, as my modem lives in my bedroom due to the fact that it's the only place in my apartment with a jack.

And then, miracle of miracles - he fixed it! Just like that! He clicked some stuff and did some other random fiddling with cords and suchlike and bingo bango bongo, I have internets again! I can even feel the warm glowing warming glow of the wireless internet-y goodness making their way from my wireless modem/router to my laptop. No really, I can.

I believe that the business lingo for this tell-them-you'll-be-there-on-Saturday-and-then-when-you-show-up-on-Thursday-they-will-be-all- happy-about-it is called "Underpromise, then overperform." I have no idea where I heard that, and I've probably completely messed it up. But the idea is that you promise something that is much less than what you can really do and then you will supposedly look good when you get it done faster. But I'm not falling for it. I still know that I was without internets for over 5 full days and I won't forget it Telus!

And now, a list of things that I missed doing and am ever so happy I can do again, now that I am jacked back into the Matrix in my own home:

• blog
• play Scrabulous
• upload my photos to Flickr
• watch Stephen Colbert in my bed
• watch various other videos that are NSFW⁴
  
• catch up on all of your blogs
• do my banking
• check the bus schedule before I leave the house
• talk to people who live outside of Vancouver⁵
• and so forth

¹for the record, although this sounds like the start of a porn or something, it totally wasn't like that.
²I was going to work 'til 5 pm.
³Which is a whole other story, but involves me having chucked a whole bunch of boxes that Dani had neatly stacked in the corner all over my room in an attempt to see if the modem was plugged into the jack in said corner and not putting them back since I figured that the Telus dude would need to access the jack, which he did; a half assembled Ikea bookshelf, which was abandoned only half assembled when I discovered that I'd put the sides on facing the wrong way and I didn't have a hammer to remove all the nails that needed to be removed to fix the wrong-way-facing side problem, the nails having been nailed in using the heel of one of my sturdier pairs of high heel shoes; my not having been home a single night this week to do things like tidy up my place; all combined with my general level of messiness.
⁴I'm going to leave it up to your imagination exactly what I'm talking about there ;-)
⁵I only call long distance on Skype. Seems silly to pay long distance charges on my cell when I can talk for free via the series of tubes that makes up the intarweb. And then when my intarweb is down, it turns out that I'm just too cheap to pay for long distance now.