Go right ahead

You never know when you'll run into one of Them.  No, not the British band led by Van Morrison who sang "Gloria" in 1964. Not the 1954 movie about giant ants.   Not even the people who late at night send furtive emails about how the government is stockpiling weapons and Band-Aids to suppress the right of the people to do whatever they will.

No, we're talking about something even more insidious to our welfare.  This is about speech fillers, the little extra words that some add to their everyday conversation.

I was on hold with the cable company the other day, and the first thing I hear after choosing my language is an abuse of my language.  "Presently, all agents are assisting other callers..." says a recorded voice.  "Presently" means "soon," if you want to be proper.

It was even worse when a young lady got on the line and found out my problem, which is that sometimes when I record a certain show on the DVR, that show is not there to watch the next day.  Overnight, when all the house is asleep, electronic monsters prowl the house and delete my precious episodes of "Jerseylicious," "Car 54, Where Are You?" and "Howie Met Your Mother."

The young lady expressed, with great poignancy, her solemn regret over this hideous inconvenience.

And then it began.

"I'm going to go ahead and send a signal to your cable box and then we can go ahead and check the diagnostics and see what things look like.  OK?  I'm going to go ahead and send the signal now."

I stared at the TV screen and waited.  I don't know what was supposed to happen.  Maybe Barbara Eden would pop up, dressed in a genie costume?  Nothing happened.  So I told her nothing happened, and she said we were going to go ahead and send a stronger signal this time.

I grabbed the coffee table to make sure I was grounded. Nothing happened anyway.  She told me that it might take 30 to 45 minutes for the system to reset itself.  And then I think that I asked what would happen if I lost any more shows, and she said that if that happened, they would go ahead and send a technician out to house to go ahead and see what is happening.

I told her that if that turned out to be the case, I would call her back and tell her to go ahead and give the technician the go-ahead to go ahead and come out here.

She said to go ahead and do that.