08/11/1999 – Don't mess with the bull, young man. You'll get the horns.
I didn’t have too much time to get in touch with people today as I actually had to do some work around the office, but the spare time I did have I spent trying to get more answers, and trying to make my voice a little louder.
One thing I haven’t mentioned yet in this document is the creation of a website (https://members.tripod.com/redcat242) that this document is being replicated on. I began that site on august Ninth (one week after the installation of my service). In the beginning of this document I figured it would take three or four days and then things would be wrapped up, in the mean time I could jot down these notes and make a little story and submit it to some trade magazines or some local news papers. Unfortunately we’re at a week and a half today with no solution in site. You’ll notice that the titles of each day changed format. That’s because I have a feeling that this could go a lot longer than I initially figured.
A friend of mine was browsing around www.deja.com and found an article about xDSL and cable. At the bottom of that message there was contact information for the Cable Regulatory Coordinator. I called and e-mailed this person blindly. I wasn’t sure if she was a Bresnan QA person or some outside committee. It turned out that she is a city employee whose job it is to make sure that cable companies stay in line. I talked to her and told her a little bit about my story and pointed her to my web page. She noticed that an ex city alderman had seen my web page and e-mailed that to her. She also noted that I’m not unique in my complaint, there are a lot of people with @home headaches. She said there was nothing she could do to forcibly make them go faster as there ads boast "up to 100X a normal modem". We both agreed that it was still misleading advertisement on their part.
(Special note: 100X 56k modem is about 480k/sec (4.8Mbps) which is the equivalent of about 4 T1 lines (T1=1.2Mbps))
She then said she would file this with the rest of the complaints and take a look at my web page and forward this information to some board meeting that Bresnan @home would be attending. Unless something totally goes wrong with my billing or my service again, I probably won’t talk to her again.
A bit later on in the day I began to think about what the NOC would do with my issue. Would they file it away as just the latest complaint, or were there some techs actually working on it. I decided I needed to find out as my request to Melanie wasn’t being fulfilled (that request was for me to know exactly what’s going on or to at least no the plan of action). I called Melanie and left a message on her voice mail as she was out for the day. I figured she would be my best course to get some action or some answers. Since she wasn’t in, I decided to call Matt. Now Matt’s a tech and is probably swamped with work and not trained to deal with these protocol issues (I know this, as I am a tech). I got him on the phone and asked what the NOC had done so far. He instantly said nothing new had developed. I asked if I could get in contact with them. He told me that not even he can get a hold of them with out going through three levels. Prying I asked, "But they are located in Madison, right?" He told me no. A little voice when off in my head, I knew it! Prying even further I asked "oh... where are they?" Now as my girlfriend can tell you, I am terrible at asking prying questions and trying to make it sound like I’m not prying but even I could tell by the sound of my voice that I was prying. Either he didn’t catch on or didn’t care but he said, "California". He then asked for my last name. I told him and he realized I was the wrong Jeremy. He looked up my ticket and told me it was marked "Still in Progress". I thanked him and let him go.
"California?!!?" I thought. What the hell are they going to do there? The issue seems to be pretty well centralized around my house if not my entire neighborhood. Maybe if it’s a dead router they could find that, but that would mean that all my transfers from @home would be really fast. Maybe they are. Tonight I need to test the news server, if I get fast transfers off that, then I can pretty much assure myself that the people in California aren’t going to fix or find my problem.