08/04/1999 – The cable modem is finally here, enjoy speeds of up to 100X faster…
It’s Wednesday, I wake up around 10am again. I’ve spent most of my time with tech support and the other portion of my time unpacking and organizing. I was going to go to work for half the day today but decided that if I did Bresnan would show up and then say they couldn’t do anything because they couldn’t gain entry to my house.
Same deal as the day before, I get up make some coffee, eat some food, watch a little TV. It’s always been my theory that "the faster you rush to do something, the faster you are to being let down". After puttering around for about an hour I decide to once again try the computer. There is no difference. I wait a little while, I mean the supervisor from tech support in Michigan called someone in Madison, you’d think that the people in Madison would realize that they have dropped the ball and get out here as soon as possible. I check sporadically throughout the day, I figure that Bresnan may not need to come into the house after all and maybe they will replace some things outside. Two O’clock rolls around and no one has shown up. I call tech support again and get a hold of a guy named Ram. He looks at my ticket and instantly tells me that I need to talk to Matt in Madison. He tells me that Matt is a system administrator and I should talk to him.
I call Matt in Madison and his first question is "who gave you this number?" If you can interpret that, that means, "No one in Michigan should be giving out my extension". He can’t get access to my ticket so I go through all the details of my problem. Then my cell phone cuts out. (I’m on cell because the Phone Company still hasn’t hook up my phone line). I call back, and finish my story. He begins to recap what I told him. Then my cell cuts out again. I grab a different phone and call back and ask him to continue. My cell cuts out again. I wait about 5 minutes figuring he’ll just call me back. He doesn’t. I call him again and ask what he’s going to do, and tell me quick before the phone cuts out. He says he’ll send out a RF tech to take levels again. The phone cuts out. Good enough, if he needs to schedule something with me, he can call me back.
He never calls me back, nor does anyone come to my house to do any level checking. Overwhelmed with frustration I call the "Customer Care Center" again. I am on hold for awhile and forced to listen messages about all the rich multimedia I can download in the time it takes to listen to this message and how I’ll experience transfers of up to 100X faster. These messages mock me and get my frustration even higher. I get a tech on the line and ask for a manger. I am ready to tear into someone; I’ve had more then enough of this.
Dwayne gets on phone. "Great," I think, "this couldn’t do anything for me yesterday, what good is yelling at him going to do." I tell him I’m still broke and I want to be fixed and he says "they’re working on it and I can call as much as I want but when they know something they’ll call me." He’s nice enough though, he has me run through some Diagnostics. He does some checks on his end, and he is also the first one to double-check my computer settings. Like I said in the beginning, I’m a network administrator, but I make mistakes and I’m not 100% educated on how this cable network is put together. Not once did I throw around the Phrase "Network Admin" to any of techs. Saying that just turns you into a pompous ass and then people just don’t want to help you because you are the high and mighty sys admin. "Fix it yourself" would come to my mind. At any rate, everything on my computer checks out and does say that my downstream is slow and that my tracert is not quite up to par. He’ll add this information to my ticket. I let him off the phone.