Finally Back

Hi.

We finally have internet service again. I may have time to do a more thoughtful post later this afternoon or this evening, but for now I just want to rant about what a frustrating experience this has been.

We ordered phone and internet service in mid-July, to start in our new place on August 10. On that date, the phone service started but we had not heard anything about the internet service. Some investigation revealed that the order that had been placed had been cancelled because some bright bulb over at Verizon decided to implement our DSL before we actually had an operative phone line, and when s/he couldn't do that, decided the only thing to do was cancel the order. And it somehow made the most sense to do that without telling us. This was only discovered after a great deal of time on the phone. A new order was entered into the queue. In an effort to be helpful, a customer service person got its implementation moved up. Again, on the day it was supposed to begin we found we had no internet and no communication from the company. More time on the phone with various company representatives established that there had been another screw-up. We ended up having to wait again, not only to the original service start date for our re-placed order, but a week beyond that.

Our internet service finally began yesterday morning. The Verizon start-up software only works on Mac or Windows, so I got it going under the Windows partition on my machine just to make sure everything was working. But for some reason I couldn't get the connection working under Linux, which was very distressing because I use Linux almost exclusively at home. It was a very frustrating day. I only found out this morning, thanks to a helpful netizen on a Usenet group, that in fact the very first question I asked of Verizon tech support yesterday (to get basic information on how they set things up) was answered incorrectly so I had spent my day trying to get the connection working the wrong way.

It is now working, with one minor hiccough that should be cleared away soon enough. I have a bunch of backed up correspondence and work to do that will probably take me the rest of the day and perhaps into tomorrow, but I hope to resume posting regularly to this site in the next day or two. Not to mention getting back to the work I should have been doing yetserday and today.

We are getting three months of free service, which I suppose is nice but I would still have rather been able to connect the day we moved in.

Pfui.