JanuceTutu and the Great Xfinity Pilgrimage
JanuceTutu sounds like a username for a former ballerina Muppet, not an 89-year-old Chinese immigrant.
And yet.
Your mom’s phone, cable, and internet have been down for two days. When you arrive at the house to troubleshoot, she’s watching Woody Woodpecker reruns from the 1960s on some digital over-the-air channel you didn’t know still existed. (You also didn’t know digital over-the-air channels were still a thing, but that’s a separate crisis of understanding how anything works anymore.)
She doesn’t complain about the downed connections—mostly because you’ve been paying for her cable. You ask about her alter ego, Januce. “iTalkBB did it,” she says, like she’s reporting the weather. “The young man said I should use my English name more often.”
What you know about iTalkBB, to be honest, is not much. According to your mom, it lets her get cable and phone service much cheaper, in Chinese. Yet somehow it isn’t a replacement for her phone service? You don’t know. Apparently, they have a young Mandarin-speaking staff member who lets old Asian ladies come up with wacky English-language usernames.
You stare at her account screen. JanuceTutu stares back, somehow both whimsical and vaguely insulting.
“Mom, did you tell him to add ‘Tutu’?”
“No. He just did it.”
“Did you... ask why?”
“No.”
This is how systems work now—someone shows up, changes your name to something that sounds like a rejected Teletubbies character, and you just accept it because the alternative is trying to argue with a nice man who’s just doing his job. Nobody really understands what anyone else is doing. We’re all just improvising our way through a shared delusion we’ve agreed to call infrastructure.
The really absurd part? She says the only reason she keeps Xfinity is for the news from Taiwan. Not China. Taiwan. This distinction matters to her in ways you’ll never fully understand, rooted in family history and political geography that predates your existence by decades.
You ask if there’s a cheaper way to stream it. She shakes her head, solemn, as you’ve just wondered if there’s a more affordable way to breathe air.
“No. It’s only on this channel.”
You want to argue. You want to pull up your phone and show her the seventeen different streaming options that definitely, probably, maybe have Taiwanese news. But you also know what you’re really arguing about isn’t the cable bill—it’s about the things breaking down around her that she won’t let you help with because of pride, or shame, or some combination of immigrant parent math that doesn’t translate into any language you speak. It’s about the one thing connecting her to home, and you trying to optimize it away with your laptop and your very American belief that everything should be cheaper and more efficient.
(Or is that a very Asian American belief? Ugh, shut up, Ernie.)
So instead, you just nod. “Okay. Let’s fix the internet.”
You call the 1-800 number. It tells you to go to the website.
The website tells you to call the 1-800 number.
This goes on for longer than you care to admit. At one point, a chatbot named “Xfinity Assistant” asks if you’re satisfied with your resolution. You type, “I don’t even know who I am anymore.” It responds with a thumbs-up emoji and closes the chat.
Here’s where your ADHD kicks in and you start spiraling through your own digital archaeology. You discover you’ve been paying her Xfinity bill for—Jesus Christ—seven years. Seven years of autopay, just silently draining from your account like some kind of filial subscription service you forgot you’d signed up for. The only reason it stopped was the fraud incident last year, when some asshole in Hayward tried to buy his two girlfriends’ auto insurance policies on your checking account, and you had to close the whole thing and start over.
(If you’re wondering why you didn’t notice seven years of cable bills, the answer is: you don’t know. ADHD and financial trauma make a hell of a cocktail. Sometimes you just... don’t look. It’s a survival mechanism that doubles as self-sabotage.)
You try three more phone numbers. One of them plays hold music that sounds like a MIDI file of “Für Elise” being slowly drowned in a bathtub. Another one just hangs up on you after thirty seconds, which you honestly respect—at least it was honest about not wanting to help.
Your mom sits on the couch watching Woody Woodpecker laugh maniacally while drilling holes in a tree. She’s eerily calm, like she’s achieved some kind of zen state through deprivation. Meanwhile, you’re over here inventing new and exciting forms of cardiovascular disease, trying to reach a human being at a company that has decided human beings are optional.
“Maybe we just go to the store,” she finally suggests.
The store. Right. Like it’s 1987 and you’re returning a defective toaster.
Mom dresses like you’re going to the immigration office. She tells you to iron her good pants. You try to explain that the Xfinity store is in a strip mall next to a Ross. She waves you off like you’re the one being naive.
“You never know who you’ll see,” she says, which is her way of saying that dignity matters even when you’re about to argue with a teenager in a polo shirt about why your username is JanuceTutu.
The store is exactly as depressing as you imagined. Fluorescent lights. Rows of modems in boxes like they’re precious artifacts. A woman ahead of you is trying to return a cable box she’s had for nine years. The employee keeps saying, “Ma’am, I wasn’t born yet when you got this box,” which is both funny and deeply existentially troubling.
When it’s your turn, you explain the situation. The kid—because he is, genuinely, a kid—looks at the screen, squints, and says, “JanuceTutu. Huh. That’s...”
“Yep. Can we change it?”
“Technically? Yeah. But it’ll reset all her settings. And she’ll have to re-authenticate all her devices.”
You look at your mom. She looks at you. You both understand what this means: hours of explaining what a password is, why it matters, and why her birthday doesn’t count as a secure password even though “nobody knows” it. (A lot of people know your birthday, Mom.)
“Let’s just leave it,” she says.
“You sure?”
“It’s fine. I just need the Taiwan news.”
So you leave it. JanuceTutu lives on, a monument to bureaucratic absurdity and the limits of what problems are worth solving. The kid activates her service. She’s thrown off at first— “That fast? Doesn’t someone have to fix it...?” You test it on her phone right there in the store. Sure enough, there’s her channel, broadcasting news from Taipei about weather patterns and political scandals you don’t understand.
She smiles. Really smiles. Not the polite smile she gives you when you try to help. The real one.
“Okay,” she says. “We can go now.”
You got it sorted, mostly. She got her Taiwan news. You got to feel like you helped, sort of. The username is still JanuceTutu. Neither of you really knows how to change it, and honestly? You don’t think either of you cares anymore. It’s just another weird thing in a world that’s increasingly made of weird things held together by duct tape and the hope that someone, somewhere, knows what they’re doing.
And your account is off the auto-pay. While you feel like a failed son, it’s one less thing to keep track of.
On the drive home, she asks if you want to come in for tea. You tell her you have work. She nods, doesn’t push. Before you leave, she thanks you, which makes you feel both good and like a fraud, because you’re not sure what you actually fixed beyond showing up and being willing to stand in a strip mall for an hour.
But maybe that’s enough. Maybe that’s all it ever is—showing up, standing next to someone while they deal with their JanuceTutu moments, and not pretending you have all the answers.
The username stays. The news keeps playing. You keep going.
Not a failed son at all. Your dedication to her is amazing. Also, the line "hold music that sounds like a MIDI file of “Für Elise” being slowly drowned in a bathtub" is the kind of thing that's had me reading your stuff for... jeez, how many years is it? A long time!