08/09/1999 – The cable modem is finally here… yet no one knows how to work it.
I know that if the RF guy didn’t come Friday night or Saturday afternoon, they would be here between 8am and 10am this morning. I call in late to work. The tech doesn’t arrive until 9:30 (of course) and he checks the levels and replaces a T outside and the cable running from the T inside to the modem and then replaces the modem itself. Transfers are up about 2kb/sec. So now I get about 5kb/sec. Of course the speed increase could be just because net traffic tends to be a bit lower during the day. He explains that there isn’t anything else he can do. He leaves.
I go to work and call Matt and tell him the story. He tells me that he’ll try to work on it on his side and try to get my issue escalated. He informs me that he has escalated other issues and they’ve been rejected. I ask him when it will be fixed. He doesn’t know. He says he’ll call me tomorrow morning. About five minutes later another guy calls from Michigan and asks if my problem is solved. I tell him that I’ve been working with Madison since the Michigan helpdesk is worthless and incompetent. I called them all week and nothing got done. I called Madison and the next business day someone was at my house. The issue wasn’t fixed but someone came to my door. He said he’d call back another time.
I called billing first thing in the morning and talked to the lady about my credit and the fact that I’m being billed for a defective service. She was very nice and credited my credit card, and put my billing on hold so that my free month wouldn’t start until my service started working right. That’s probably the first bit of good news I’ve heard since this whole ordeal started.
I had called Melanie who is the office manager for the Madison portion of @Home later in the morning as I was a little upset that Matt just said he was going to keep working on it. He didn’t elaborate. She wasn’t so I left a message. She called back around 3pm and got the update from, no one had told her what was going on. She said she would talk to Matt and have them give me updates.