Time and again....

[Cybernikes]

Let me Warner you, its rant Time, about my Cable company.

So I have this cable company whose name I will not mention, and they are without a doubt spawn of the eternal satan.

Four days ago my internet went down, it is still down, four days ago. Not my neighbors mind you, just me. Still down, still without service, right here smack dab in the industrialized heartland of America.

Yeah, I know I'm posting, I'll get to that. (Actually, at one point I thought I had fixed it, I logged in here and started to post when it went back down!)


So, you know I don't like the cloud, even though some nifty tools reside there. Well I was working for a client that required a specific toolset, available only in the cloud, when like clockwork, just past midnight my internet goes down. Now this is nothing new to me. My crappy cable company apparently has my particular connection spliced together with two soup cans, some twine and duct tape, because every single freaking evening like clockwork the net goes down.

This has become a ritual on nights where I am pushing a deadline, stop, stretch, do some minute task waiting for the modem to reset. Some short task while the crack crew over at the acme cable and hair care center get their collective acts together, you know, like re-roofing the entire house. Seriously this ritual is guaranteed to suck up at least three mind numbing hours watching the little yellow icon staring back at me, while my modem blinks rapidly in total confusion from the credenza.

Now when this first started happening, I used to call the techs. But now, I almost always try to save myself the near stroke out I get from talking to the infuriating batch of morons they have assembled over at tech support for the sheer purpose of pissing people off.  Almost always. Three hours came and went, still no service. Four, five, six, seven. Seven hours! Seven am, fighting sleep, up all night doing in seven hours what I could have done in one, had I not been forced to find a toolset workaround, I'm ready.


Me; *Dials crappy cable company local office*

Crappy cable service local office; *Queues message* "Hi, I'm an incredibly annoying person with an accent that is indigent to some other star system near the former planet Pluto, and if you don't like my message you are a racist, planet killing homophobe." ...

..."If you are calling about the pretty obvious outage you are experiencing please note we really don't give a crap. It's true we are doing some planned work in your area that we did not care enough about you to warn you about in advance, and it's equally true we are confounding the matter by hiding behind insipid taped messages and endless obnoxious sound loops that only serve to piss you off even further, but as we say around here, tough! I mean, you are free to start your own cable service ha ha ha ha."....

...."Good night irate customer, please pay your bill then go straight to hell."...*click*

Me; *Dials crappy cable company's national customer service number*

Crappy cable company's national customer service; *Queues message with insipid, overly sweet, highly condescending, female voice.*
"Hi, you sure pushed those touch tone buttons like a real trained monkey, good boy! Unfortunately we gottems a wittle pwoblem, so sad but, Johnny isn't getting cable tonight, so now you get back to bed young man and stop tying up the phone 'cause we don't have answers for wittle boys up past their bed time!" *click*

Me; *Dials crappy cable company's national tech support number*

Crappy cable company's service tech; "Hi, I'm Loser Joe, what can  I help you with, and say would you believe I have been fired from my last seven consecutive jobs and I still can't tie my own shoes without aid?"


Yeah, as you can imagine that was a very fruitful call wherein snotty tech guy, who was probably trying to figure out how to use technology in a proper sentence while I was taking charge of the  delivery of the Space Shuttle main fuel tank, proceeds to try and educate me on the astoundingly intricate workings of the single most crappy modem ever invented!

So here is how the next four days went. I make the roundabout calling in sequence, main office, customer service, tech support. I talk to anyone I can get to the phone, agents, supervisors, supervisors' supervisors, techs, geeks, suits,  and I'm pretty sure someone from the custodial department. Nothing, nada, zip zero.



All that calling and we get a schmuck in a truck who pops out for two seconds while I have crashed from exhaustion, looks at my wife , says nothing, slaps a tag on my door that says sorry we missed you, your change of service has been done.

Change of service who ordered change of service? What do you mean you missed us? Did you think the lady out front carrying bags of groceries into the front door you are hanging a door tag on was breaking in?


That’s it! Okay so here is how I am online. See we have the crappy cable company serving my home office and my personal two computer intranet and our home phone.  I have kept them solely for their high upload speed. I set this up after I got a back door virus courtesy of one of our son's computers.

Now my wife also works on the web, she's a writer. Her home office is above mine overlooking the back yard, and we have an AT&T account (business, you can't have two personal accounts to the same address) which creates the second intranet, consisting of  Beth's computer and the other computers, tablets, media servers in the house.

So, I went out and bought a forty dollar cable and strung it from upstairs into my office so I could get back online, thank you crappy cable company.

So what have I learned? Well if nothing else it has served to underscore my misgivings about cloud based clients in general.

So I guess I'll just have to port my phone over to AT&T and make do with their cable service which although reliable, is about as blazing fast as your average carrier pigeon.


And the crappy cable company?


Me; *Dials crappy cable company tech support* Hello Loser, how the heck are ya? Say you know that modem we were talking about, well I got it right here in front of me. And know what else I got? It's called a sawsall....S..a..w..s..a..l..l, that's right kiddies it's a tool we old timers like to use for really pesky problems, now don't be afraid at the noise. WOW look at it cut right through this plastic, bwah ha ha!!!






















 

[HeyYou]

 

Sorry man. I am way to familiar with the joys of talking to tech support....... They are little better than monkeys trained to read from a script...... if you deviate from the script ONE IOTA, they are completely and totally lost. Not to mention most of them only learned english last week....... I can't count the number of times I have had to request a different tech, because I couldn't understand the one I was talking to.... and then they are offended because THEY can't speak comprehensible english.... Seriously?? The company I have now for internet is friggin tiny. I think they may have all of three people.... including the owner...... When it goes down, calling them is pointless, as there is no such thing as 'tech support' there. You just have to make sure the problem is indeed on their end, and wait for them to fix it....... I am waiting VERY impatiently for the local telco to fire off all the neat, new equipment they have been working on installing for the last two years...... according to theory, it is supposed to be available this summer. Of course, I heard that last summer too...... not fiber, like I was first led to believe, but, DSL, and, since the pad is about three feet from my property line, I should be able to get a 25mbps connection without any trouble at all. Which just beats the snot right out of the 1.5mbps I get now, most of the time anyway.....

 

Got any alternatives to your 'cable' company there??

[Cybernikes]

Ah, well as I said we already have AT&T in part of the house, and as far as I know the only real alternative here. But I'm not exactly thrilled with them either. Two things come to mind, speed which I already mentioned and some really annoying billing practices.

Now granted my wife and I have had no problems with their current business internet service, but we used to have their cell service and I hated them then. Every month with AT&T cell phone service it was like a bad episode of let's make a deal. "Oh no, it looks like we will be billing you arbitrarily this month with a price plan we just pulled out of our butts! I know you are paying more than we agreed on but hey we own all the cell phone towers so what are going to do about it?!"

Yeah that got old real quick. Now like I said I really don't have any gripes about their internet service, but knowing how they have been in the past really makes me wary.