{"id":1052,"date":"2009-09-09T09:06:00","date_gmt":"2009-09-09T09:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/2009\/09\/can-you-knock-first.html"},"modified":"2014-08-22T15:53:09","modified_gmt":"2014-08-22T20:53:09","slug":"can-you-knock-first","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/2009\/09\/can-you-knock-first.html","title":{"rendered":"Can You Knock First?"},"content":{"rendered":"<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC \"-\/\/W3C\/\/DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional\/\/EN\" \"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/TR\/REC-html40\/loose.dtd\">\n<html><head><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><\/head><body><p>We had a stranger in our backyard this morning.  I knew he was there when the dogs went crazy.  Imagine my surprise at seeing a perfect stranger in my backyard not wearing a uniform of any kind, waving a huge wrench around and spitting at the dogs.  I don\u2019t know what possible purpose spitting tobacco juice all over my yard could serve, but it\u2019s probably the same thoughtlessness which allowed him to scrape the dog poo he stepped in on my patio rather than on the grass. <\/p>\n<p>He was from the gas company, but who knew that?  He never knocked on my door to let me know he was here to do something to my meter.  If he had, I would have brought my dogs inside so he didn\u2019t have to spit at them or threaten them with that huge wrench.  If he had bothered to ring my doorbell, he could have walked across my lawn and looked where he stepped because he wouldn\u2019t have been chased by a wild-eyed schnauzer and he wouldn\u2019t have gotten the poo on his shoe.  If he had knocked and asked, I could have saved him the trouble of going in my yard at all since he was actually looking for my neighbor\u2019s meter across the street.  See how much time and effort we could have saved if only he had bothered to have a bit of courtesy this morning?<\/p>\n<p>My first instinct was to call the gas company and give them a piece of my mind.  (I\u2019ll probably still do that.)  They need to know that one of their employees was trespassing this morning and that he was just generally a disgusting human being.  The way I see it, the economy is not so good that they can afford this kind of poor customer relations.  Then again, they\u2019re the gas company and I have no other choice about where to go for hot water and heat.  They\u2019re the only game in town.<\/p>\n<p>While the yahoos in Washington are trying to \u201cfix healthcare\u201d with a bit of competition, why don\u2019t they do the same thing for the utility companies?  Most of them operate as local monopolies and could use a bit of competition to keep them on their toes.  If there were another gas company I could go to, then this yutz would have been told to clean up his act or find a new job a while ago.  As it stands now, he\u2019s competent enough, and reliable enough, and not too disgusting, so there\u2019s no reason to make any kind of change.  After all, we\u2019re a captive audience and the gas company knows it.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We had a stranger in our backyard this morning. I knew he was there when the dogs went crazy. Imagine my surprise at seeing a perfect stranger in my backyard not wearing a uniform of any kind, waving a huge wrench around and spitting at the dogs. I don\u2019t know what possible purpose spitting tobacco [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1979,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1052","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Can You Knock First?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"We had a stranger in our backyard this morning. I knew he was there when the dogs went crazy. Imagine my surprise at seeing a perfect stranger in my\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/2009\/09\/can-you-knock-first.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Can You Knock First?\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"We had a stranger in our backyard this morning. I knew he was there when the dogs went crazy. 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