I go home for lunch and sure enough, stupid thing still doesn’t work. I hit the reset button and go eat some lunch. Before I leave for work I check the modem. Still no connection. I go back to work. I call Matt, he’s not there so I leave a message. I call Jeff, he’s not in so I leave a message. I call the 888 number and wait. My other phone rings and it’s Jeff. I begin to explain the problem and mention that I called the 888 number last night and they told me that most all of Madison was out. He put me on hold. He told me that dispatcher said there wasn’t anything major going on. He asked what time my service went out and then put me on hold. He came back and told me that a few blocks were off line while they added some more bandwidth but not my block. So once again I was lied to. I then (was pretty arrogant) asked if he had any idea who I was or what I was going through. He asked for my name and when I told him he new exactly who I was and told me to let him call me back.

He called me back about 5 minutes later and said he was going to generate a ticket. I told him that the guy who told me that all of Madison was out last night already generated a ticket. He said he would find that and escalate that to the top. He also told me that if I didn’t hear anything by 5pm to call him directly. I decided to call Dave. I got his voice mail. I left a brief message about my call to Bay City last night and my talk with Jeff.

After not receiving any calls for a couple of hours I hopped into the news group. I saw that channel 15 did story on Bresnans’ slow service. I check out their page and it had no listing of my web page or me. Now I’m not the expert here but I done a lot of legwork here and feel that more people should know about what I am doing. I decided to call more TV stations. I called channel 27 and explained the story and gave him my web page. He didn’t sound like he was actually going to do anything with it. I called channel 3. The woman I spoke to sounded pretty enthusiastic about it but didn’t really know what I was talking about. She took my web page and said she’d take it to the meeting as someone else had brought something up about it.

4:30 rolls around and I’m getting kind of upset. I’m thinking that Dave isn’t going to call me. Doug the dispatcher calls me and asks why I wasn’t home between 10am-12pm. This floors me. I start almost yelling at this guy that no one set up anything with me and why was there someone at my house anyway? Doug could not find the answer to that. I asked who scheduled the appointment. All he could come up with was that someone yesterday at 1pm set up the appointment. I start to rant about this because it does really tick me off but he interrupts and tells me that my RCA cable modem was never registered to my account. They had all the paperwork, but that number was never registered. He just got done registering it and said that when I got home and reset the modem it should work. There was no explanation for this. He told me to call him when I got home so that he could have the results. If needed he could have someone come out tomorrow for further work. Maybe Dave is looking out for me, but right now it’s 4:50 and he hasn’t called me. It’s nice that he has this set up for me, but he should really be calling me to see how I’m doing.

My theory is, the guy on 08/09/1999 installed my RCA and activated the serial number. When the modem came up he went about his way. Now remember, on that date I had to call Matt and Melanie and let them know that the tech had shown up and replaced my modem and that my service was still slow. That tech had not done that. So he went about his way and forgot to assign that serial to my account. A week goes by and during a routine audit that find this active cable modem that isn’t assigned to anyone. Not realizing that half their service is a mess anyway, they decide to turn that port off. I call in today and no one can figure out what’s going on until they open my record and see that I have no modem assigned to me. They track down the paper work, assign the modem and all should be well. The part about the guy last night telling me that Madison was down doesn’t really make too much sense, but I guess that’s just the norm for now.

I go home and sure enough, the modem is connected. I call Doug and tell him that I’m connected and that I want to test the speed. Sure enough that is still about 5k/sec. I tell him that I’m no better off then I was yesterday at 1pm when the tech was scheduled to come to my house and that the tech wasn’t going to fix this non connection issue but my speed issue. He says "but you’re connecting right?" I reiterate the fact that as of now and 1pm yesterday there is no change, I’m still slow. He says he’s going to turn this into a speed issue so that he can get it out of his pile. "No Doug, you’re not doing that, I’ve worked for 2 weeks to get you people to realize this is not a T1 bandwidth issue, this is a physical networking problem." He’s stumped. I ask if he’s going to send someone out. He asks me why. I say to do whatever they were going to do today. He tells me that they were just going to test the lines and according to his records, my lines test out fine. He then rhetorically asks me if I want someone to come out. I tell him to forget it and I’ll call Dave tomorrow and see what’s going on. I hang up on him. The moron. The more people I talk to the worse they talk to me. Like the guy who asked me if I knew what bandwidth was. God I want to slap some faces.