No, seriously… dial-up Internet?

At first I laughed.

Dial-up Internet is all they have in the Hickory pressbox, my friend and fellow broadcaster Landon Sears said about a week-and-a-half ago when the Tourists first started a four-game series at LP Frans Stadium.

It hit me: Landon wasn’t lying. My laptop wasn’t reading any wireless signal. I looked and there were no high-speed Internet ports.

And there it was, the extra phone line.

The laughs turned to tears.

I didn’t even have a way to get on-line. The visiting radio booth in Hickory doubles as a storage unit. So I moved boxes of Duke’s Mayonnaise, just to see if I could come up with a miracle. And I did. There it was, a lousy AOL disc to get on-line for a month free.

Of course, I had to give a credit card and then cancel before the month was up, just to get the money back that was taken as a deposit for the next month (just in case I didn’t cancel in time). I figured the canceling phone call would require at least a 20 minute call of my saying "no, just cancel my account" over and over again.

But, I loaded the disc, went through the process, and then heard… The Noise… that annoying squeal of dial-up, which in a very sick manner was comforting as it made me reminisce back to a simpler day when I was young.

Trying not to tax the system, I had no instant messaging, I could receive e-mails on our pressbox@theashevilletourists.com but I couldn’t send anything out. And it took about five minutes to load the "Super Supers Sally League Scoreboard Update."

The last thing I was going to try and do was use the Internet to do my blog.

So, that’s where I’ve been. When I’m at home, I don’t do the blog, usually, because I’m a full-time sales person, and want to spend time with my family. It doesn’t make sense to have my 3-year-old crying because he’s hungry while Daddy is telling him to hold on because he’s busy blogging. Yeah, just doesn’t make sense.

Anyway, fret not, because when the Tourists head to Augusta, we’ll have high-speed Internet again.

Hear that Hickory? Even Augusta has high-speed !!!