Dial up hell

Right now, I’m having to connect to the Internet via a dial up connection. To make a long story long, I called my phone company on Wednesday to schedule the transfer of my phone line to my new address – with an effective date of January 20th. On Thursday evening when I came home, I noticed I could not connect to the Internet – I reset my DSL modem several times, and when I would try to pull up my browser, the Earthlink diagnostics page would come up the spot where it tested the connection to the carrier was coming up “failed”. So I picked up my phone to see if I had a dial tone. I didn’t. I called my phone company on my cell phone to find out what the problem was and come to find out, the lady who had set up my transfer for the 20th neglected to change the disconnect date from it’s default of the 5th to the 20th. So my phone was disconnected on Thursday.

I could not get my phone line back Thursday night (so the supervisor said – which I found out yesterday was a lie). The supervisor I spoke to assured me that my phone would be connected again by midnight Friday. I called the phone company again Friday afternoon just to make sure this was in place to happen. After over an hour and a half of holding and being transferred and telling my story to about 6 people, I found out that the order the supervisor had placed for me was not supposed to be completed until next Wednesday. I told the person on the phone that was unacceptable, and I demanded to talk to a supervisor. The supervisor was able to finally get my phone back up by 6 last night – about an hour and half after I talked to him (that’s how I know what the other sup. said was a lie – no doubt he knew he could reconnect me immediately and he should have, considering it was a phone company screw up).

So anyway, after my phone line was up and running, I still couldnt get my modem to connect – and was getting the same “failed” message about the carrier connection that I had the day before. I called Earthlink last night and we went through all the steps of trying to connect and nothing worked, so I was transferred to another dept. where they created a trouble ticket for me (they said they had some trouble on the line on their end). I was instructed to call back in 24 hours. Just out of curiosity I called this morning at 9:30 and spoke with someone to get a status report on this order – what I found out from this other person was that if my phone is disconnected for more than 24 hours, that the ‘system’ (whatever that is) reads it as a permanent disconnect. The guy alerted me that they would have to treat this as a new installation – and that my DSL service would not be back up until Wednesday because that dept. doesn’t work on weekends. Peachy.

So in the meantime, here I am on dialup. I was able to set this connection up relatively easy today – it’s a service Earthlink customers receive while there are pending issues with their DSL. Last night I was housesitting, so I was able to access the I’net from there just fine. But today it’s dialup and it will be dialup here until Wednesday. The thing that irks me about all this is that it all could have been prevented had someone at the phone company been doing their job. That one mistake has led to a chain of events that have me pulling my hair out. All this is going on in the midst of me preparing to move – cleaning out old junk, trying to get things packed, etc – so needless to say I’m stressed! I have absolutely no faith in customer service at Earthlink and the phone company. None. It’s amazing how you can get two people who will give you completely different answers to the same problem. In my opinion, it would be nice if particular operators were assigned to specific cases – that way they know the history without you having to re-explain 7 different times and get 7 different answers.

At some point I’m going to have to contact Earthlink again to let them know I am moving because I’m sure they’ll need to do something with the line, even though I’ll have the same phone number. I’m looking fwd to that call about as much as I would look fwd to having a limb amputated.

Luckily, I blog from a different computer in the day during the week, but you may not be seeing much of me in the evenings next week because this dial up is sooooooooooooooooo slow. I’ll log on to release messages and check email but I can’t hang with this slow connection. No offense to anyone who has dialup, but once you’ve been on DSL for so long and then have to temporarily fall back on dialup, it’s like going from a steak to a McD’s hamburger. I’m usually doing several things at once on the computer, and when you have dial up, it’s extremely difficult to have four browser windows up because the connection will then drag.

So blogging may be scarce this weekend, but things should semi-be-back-to-normal on Monday. I’ll still be around this weekend, just not as much as I normally would be. I’ll release messages and blog this weekend as I can.

In the meantime, back to packing