Miscellaneous

This week my soon-to-be-former Internet service provider dealt me a total breakdown in both products and service. Translation: the DSL stopped working, and after three tries with what they somehow refer to without any trace of irony as ?support,? still no DSL. Fortunately, the phone line that formerly carried the DSL signal still has a dial tone. So yesterday, I downgraded my service to dial-up. The local cable company should be fixing me up with new broadband access late next week. In the meantime, while everyone else zooms by at 10-meg, I?m toddling along at 50.6K.

Speaking of ISP ?support?: why is it that the only way to contact these people is to go on-line? Even if you want to telephone them, you have to go on-line to get the phone number. This creates a Catch-22 if the problem you?re having is that you can?t get on-line.

So I had to go to another computer to contact these folks?in my case, my computer at work. So I?m at work, having an on-line chat with somebody probably on the other side of the world, and I swear that the following exchange actually took place:

Me: My DSL service is not working at all on my home computer.

Mr. Support Guy: Okay. Are you using that computer now to talk to me?

At this point, I began to lose confidence in Mr. Support Guy.