It’s become the Kurt Hummel show, a 12-part epic miniseries following the life of the plucky gay kid as he’s bullied by homophobes. Which… as a contemporary high-school issue is probably right on the mark, but it’s totally wrong for the tone of the show. They seem to have completely changed writing direction since last season and left half of their characters by the wayside.

Glee started as a sardonic, evil parody of High School Musical – the writing was quick and biting and always went off the deep end before the first commercial break. There was a teacher selling hydroponic weed to the students…

A mid-life crisis boy-band…

A fake pregnancy…

The nurse fed all the kids speed…

… basically every episode involved drugs and/or blackmail and/or Neil Patrick Harris and/or hair-o-graphy. And in the previous season the kids got more or less equal billing, with each of them bringing a fun bit of backstory to their characters (with the exception of Tina and Mercedes who got the short end of the backstory stick). Leah Michelle and Amber Riley (Rachel and Mercedes) have too much talent to be stuck in the background every episode. Let them sing!

I know, it’s stupid to get all worked up about a TV show, but it’s really the only thing I was making an effort to watch this year, so I had high hopes they’d keep up their amazing writing.

I have a litany of problems with this book, but I’ll keep this list to 3:

1) Liir, the protagonist (?) does nothing in 300 pages. The author paints Liir as a neutral party – left to his own devices to decide if he’s good or bad. But Liir’s reticence to do anything or help anybody was only interesting in it’s ability to make the book completely boring. The few clearly-defined aspects of his character are inconsistently adhered to. He’s neglected and uneducated, but can apparently read and speak multiple languages. At one point he willingly ends up in the employ of the soldier that kidnapped his childhood love. He has a flying broom but walks everywhere. He desperately wants to save Nor, but can’t be bothered to actually find her.

2) Things are happening in Oz, and the author goes into hyperfocused long boring political and theological detail, but then Liir takes off for four years and someone new has overthrown the government or something – he never sticks around long enough in one place for us to find out. I can’t help but think that we were supposed to make some allegorical connection to current events or something, (the ‘Library Journal’ review, on the front page, claims this book is ‘political satire’) but I don’t get it.

3) The author clearly wrote this book with a well-worn thesaurus next to him. While 99% of the book is written in plain English, at least once per page there’s an obscure word thrown in sideways without any context to it’s meaning. A few $6 words that stood out just by leafing through:

• retractional pluperfect subjunctive
• propitiation
• pogroms
• pollarded
• epibolically

While I’m usually pretty good at sussing out the meaning of a word (I just came from reading a book thick with Patois), I just gave up after a while – the details were so pointless and the story so boring I just wanted to be on with it.

In the first two minutes at the Bell World Store, the deal was already going south. They couldn’t find my address (despite trying about 20 times) because Winnipeg, Ontario doesn’t seem to exist. They misspelled my name two different ways (Corbil on my internet, Cobille on my phone, neither of which are fixed despite a call to the support line) and Natasha can make changes to my internet if she claims she’s “Hatasha Corbil”, but can’t make changes to our phone settings since they forgot to add her and haven’t added her since I called the help desk.

The phone service took 8 days to activate, despite a promise of two, and when it was finally set up, it took 3 more days to have a service tech come into the building to actually plug in the wire that gives me a dial tone. When I went to the store to ask the sales folks if they could check up on my account, they refused and told me to wait five more days – because my phone should magically start working. When I finally pressed the customer support agent on the phone to do a repair call, he tried to sell me insurance to hedge my bets – because if it was -my- fault that I had no ringtone, they threatened, I’d have to pay the full cost of the visit. That’s among the worst customer service upsell policies I’ve ever run across.

My DSL (promised 4 days after my initial visit to the store) took 18 days, thanks to a problem with the order system, and a mishap in the central office which still hasn’t been corrected. Now that I’m finally connected, I’m running at half speed, but paying for full. The online system for reporting an issue (which it was suggested I use) only works if you have an active account – a catch 22 if your account hasn’t been set up yet.

The customer service people I talked to were rude and impatient, rarely explaining to me what it was they were doing while they put me on hold and transferred me around the building. The lady in billing I talked to wanted desperately to get me off the line, suggesting I call back if I had any other tasks I’d like done.

At no point was anyone at Bell proactive enough to tell me that they’d discovered a problem with my wiring. There were no test calls, nobody had the foresight to call when they discovered that paperwork in the central office had been filled out incorrectly. Once my line -was- connected, nobody called to tell me it was up, I just happened to be trying to log in every 6 hours. Nobody called to tell me that they couldn’t get into my building wiring box. Nobody (for all I know) even tried.

Once I get the speed and identity issues resolved, keeping me connected shouldn’t be rocket science – I hope I have 20 years of smooth sailing ahead of me. But I’m so completely unimpressed by Bell’s service that I will DEFINITELY not be getting cell service from them and I’d chase them out with a baseball bat before letting them near my TV.