Poker Perambulation

Did that start something or what? In my day, something ala this guy who again flees civilization as we know it, it was Ma Bell. There were no options involved. Well, there were when the princess phones hit and you could select a color.

Communications then were pretty simple. All equipment was own and billed by Bell. If it broke, one of the many trucks you'd see almost daily on local roads would appear in an instant and fix wires or whatever – inside or outside.

In today's unregulated environment, options, change and service levels flounder or confuse. I no longer own a “land line” that was about the only option normal folks ever thought about in conjunction with “THE PHONE COMPANY” and their minions.

I have DSL. I got it when the sites did away with all-in protection and I was still playing some higher levels. Comcast's TOS don't guarantee your connection being .99999 like the old Bell System standard. So, I moved from there to the slower lane of DSL.

Last week, it thawed. The freeze though transferred to my DSL line. I started losing the connection and seeing massive slowing. I anointed myself and the DSL modem with holy water of the 86-proof variety and hoped. Silly goose.

When I bought DSL from Verizon, I did it in their showroom. The one glitch – it became unplugged and I missed it which did away with my claims of trouble shooter extraordinaire – I was served by a human in that same storefront.

That storefront is gone. The only thing in the area is a Verizon Wireless store that won't talk to common folk at all. Also, the area was sold to Frontier Communications without fanfare or notification. All I saw was that the autobill name changed – not to protect the innocent.

When I started DSL, their system crashed the session as I registered for an online account. I couldn't access it but I didn't really care. I handle my own email and websites so they were superfluous. You see where this is going, right?

Yesterday, I couldn't put off the problem any further. My liver said no more 86-proof holy water. So I entered “Speak or press 2 for tech support” hell. This was after doing the live chat thing. He couldn't trouble shot my line because we were connected. So, off to the recordings.

Human to human, I got one of those, let me check further responses and end up in the land of the lost hold. My callback wasn't accepted because there was now an open ticket and the recording wouldn't let me through. Evidently, an open ticket relegates your phone to second class citizenship. No talkie until resolved!  Evidently I used up my one get out of jail free card.


I am hoping that everything gets resolved. I have a ticket – hopefully not to limbo. I fear I'm back to Silly Goose status.

ADDENDUM:

In a related note, I got my water bill last week too.  It is bimonthly and typically around $75.  This one was for $162.65. Ouch!  The tenant must have installed a swimming pool.  So, I contacted the water company -- another fine utility of note.  Got the email back this morning.  They failed to read the meter.  Probably buried in one of our snow drifts.  So, that was the "estimate" of the bill.  How do they get away with such crap?

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