Archive for April 7th, 2007

On Notice: ATandT DSL

Posted on April 7th, 2007

So I bet none of you wondered at all where I’ve been the last day or so. Have you? It’s okay, you can admit it. After all, there was no way you could know that I was at home here all day, writhing in agony over the loss of my internet connection. The inexplicable absence of any connection whatsoever. No email, no blogs, nothing. To call it torture would be… well, it’d be pretty accurate, actually.

Yesterday morning, I was greeted with no connection. None of our usual fixes fixed it. Kile had to get to work, he was late as it was. And I was left, sans-internets. The horror. No way to get my 451press posts in. No way to work on designs. No way to email said clients and let them know that I wouldn’t be available. I was, in a word, out of luck. And I was pretty twitchy about it too. It was probably for the best, as Liam is suffering something (I suspect teething, again) and wanted me to hold him and engage him most of the day. But still. No internet? Seriously??

When Kile got home from work, he tried to figure it out. A call into AT&T customer service revealed that our line was okay. The tech thought it sounded like our DSL modem had gone kaput. Not surprising, considering it is five years old. But being that we’ve had DSL with them for five years, we’ve had cell phones with them for even longer and we get our dish, phone and long distance through them as well. The phones and long distance we’ve had for ages. To say we’re loyal customers is probably putting it mildly. And we never had a problem. In fact, when the company was known as SBC, we were always very satisfied with them and our dealings with them. So last night, when it was revealed we have ourselves a modem in desperate need of retirement, do they offer to get us a replacement ASAP?

Not so much. The best they could do for us was $50 off a modem through them, but in order to qualify for that deal, we need to upgrade our service (meaning more $ each month) and agree to have our bill automatically deducted from our bank account each month. Oh, the hell you say!

So we were pretty pissed by this. Kile was furious. I had moved into resignation. That’s a pretty nice thank you for being a loyal customer, was it not? I thought so. Turds.

But we got lucky. A co-worker of Kile’s happened to get an extra modem a year or so ago from SBC (back when they were a decent company). The company never charged him for the extra and he never bothered to send it back either. The box wasn’t even opened. So he let us have it. And guess what? Works like a charm. So I’m back in business, gratefully. We were all prepared to go down to Best Buy today and buy a new modem (screw AT&T’s “deal”), but this beats having to shell out the cash, right?

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have about a bazillion blogs I need to go catch up on.

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