Sat
06Corporations Can Suck It.
(Sidenote: I’ve had a shitty month, and I promise my next entry will be lighter. I swear I’m not really an angry sociopath the majority of the time.)
I am so over all of the connectivity issues we have and how shitty our ISP is. We have digital phone, cable and internet access all through the same company for more than one reason. For one, it’s a fucking monopoly so there’s no other choice as far as high speed internet access goes, and secondly, putting everything together is (albeit marginally) cheaper than paying for everything separately.
We recently had an outage that lasted for two days. Okay, fair enough. Shit happens. I’d call the support number periodically (via cellphone because nothing worked) to check on the status, and they’d been “working diligently” on the issue and no status updates, a description of what caused the outage, or any kind of time frame as to when it would be fixed were available.
Finally the phone and cable started coming back little by little, and both of those are fully restored now. The internet however? I’ve spent the good part of 2 days pinging via command prompt, reconfiguring my wireless adapter and router, and wanting to throw my computer out the window. I’m lucky to be able to connect at all right now. The odd part is, is that my Last.fm audioscrobbler and my IM client both work fine, I just can’t load pages and/or my pings are timing out. The outage is over and my area has 99% service, so I’m guessing I’m just fucked.
So, I call support. What a mistake. I verified my information FOUR times (despite the first technician telling me I wouldn’t have to verify it again), and sat on the phone for an hour with a woman in India who walked me through the same troubleshooting flows I’d been doing on my own for the past two days. Because she wouldn’t let me speak. And because her grasp of English was sparse, and that’s being generous. Lady, I’m not new to this. The shitty company you work for? Yeah, I’ve dealt with it for a while and I know all of my networking tricks.
I’m not mad at her though, she just sits there to pay her bills. I am however, pissed off at our shitty cable provider. I’m pissed that there are no other options in my area. I’m pissed that a globally traded, multi-billion dollar a year company can’t locate and fix a small (small in comparison to the network they have all over the United States) outage that effects over half of Ohio. I’m pissed that I’m pissed about this to begin with.
I’m pissed that if you try to schedule a technician to come to your home to make sure everything is in proper working order, that they give you the most ridiculous, vague ass time frame. “We can send a tech out from 2 to 5pm in a week and a half.” Are you kidding me? We pay you over $100 a month to wait a week and a half with no phone or internet access, and to sit on our asses from 2 to 5 on the off chance that a minimum wage, freshly paroled technician will stroll up and fuck with some wires? Die in a fire.
I need a vacation.