Today the cable company came and installed both cable and broadband internet — yippee! I am very excited to have real internet again. However, I am here to say that waiting for the cable company in Edinburgh is just like waiting for the cable company in Chicago.

The notice arrives: “We will be at your house between 10:00 am and 2:00 pm.” Someone has to be here to let them in. This week is fall break at every school in Scotland, so our landlady, her kids, and various other family members of theirs are out of town on holiday. Our landlord is at work.

That’s okay, I tell Leanne, our landlady. We can stay here and wait for the cable company, after all, it is for our benefit, and I am looking forward to being able to watch more Pointless shows about potatoes.

So I make sure I am ready by 10:00, in case he comes early. Someone has to be first on the list. I want to know how to make sure I am first on the daily list. When it says, “We will be there between 10:00 and …” who gets the 10:00 slot? It wasn’t us.

At noon, I ate lunch. At 1:30, the phone rang, it was Leanne. She says (to the distant music of screaming children in the background), that the installer is running late, and he’ll be here by …what did she say? I think she said 2:00. Oh, and she’s having a marvellous time with her kids. What with all the screaming in the background, I am not so sure about that. But she sounded happy enough.

At 2:10, I realise I mis-heard her. Not 2:00 — that was on a good day. She must’ve said 3:00.

I looked out the window. Sigh. My one sadness for today. It was sunny. Brilliant, blue-sky sunny. The only day all week we are supposed to get sunshine. I had planned to climb Arthur’s Seat today, the hill just outside Edinburgh with views all the way to … well, it doesn’t matter now.

Sometime between 3:00 and 3:30, someone finally showed up, but by then I had stopped looking at the clock. I wasn’t going hiking today.

He spent a few minutes fretting over cords that didn’t make sense and trying to remember our landlady’s instructions, but that didn’t take very long. As it turns out, he was both friendly and knowledgeable. He apologised for being so late and explained the house he had just come from had Tivo installed, which takes forever to do, and is complicated, and please don’t say we’re having it installed also, because he’d really like to go home and eat dinner with his girlfriend, which he hadn’t been able to do yesterday since he worked until 9:30 last night.

Then he started pulling boxes out of boxes and a unrolled a roll of cable and opened a tool bag David was drooling over. And it was all over in a matter of minutes. Our internet is brilliant, and the television now has more channels than I could ever care about.

At 5:15 I turned on Pointless and prayed for potatoes (I’ve been reading up). And then came my other all-time favourite category: Sports commentators and their sports.

Sigh.