Feb
24
Hello Everyone!
Filed Under first month
Hey everyone, we finally have internet and can share all of our wonderful experiences of our little excursion.
Sorry it took so long to get this setup, I know you’ve all been dying to know whats been going on in our lives. I personally have been excited about starting this blog, and tracking all our wild adventures, and so the story I’m about to tell you is very irritating.
The Internet Story.
Before we left from Seattle, I ordered internet using the Archstone (our apartment complex) website. It has this handy form, which made it super easy. Well, it ended up not working. Something to do with not having a lan line to the apartment. Anyway, after moving down (another whole crazy story), we call ATT to get service, go through the typical routine, address, name, get our account numbers and expect everything to work out normally. This was the 4th of February.
We don’t get our modem in the mail, and the big day of DSL installation comes around, with no word from ATT. At this point we are kind of curious how this is all going down, so we give them a call to find out what the status of our Internet order is. At this point things start to get ugly. They can’t find our account, the account number they gave us maps to an address 20 miles from our location, and the order number we have isn’t valid (its missing a number). They say the only thing we can do is to place another order, which will take another week.
At this point, we are both really pissed off, Danielle more so then I as she’s the one that has to march 6-10 blocks for internet at a library–She were even in the ghetto parts of town!, plus she’s the one that has to sit at home all by herself, without working and without the internet to look things up.
Now our order date for internet is the 19th, 15 days after we originally ordered it.
The next day, Danielle calls ATT trying to figure out what the heck happened, and gets a very capable lady who finds our previous service, and says that its already hooked up! we just need the modem and then were good to go, no waiting for 8 days. We finally find out that there is a modem with our name on it, 2 miles away sitting in a USP warehouse. (2 miles away!)
By the time we find out that our modem is with UPS and that we can just pick it up, its friday night and we can’t get it till monday. UGH!
Monday! Yaay, internet time, the connection is already cruising along and once we get the modem we can hook it up and be operating in minutes. Our only concern this monday morning (its president’s day so I get the day off too) is that the model will go out with the daily UPS delivery truck, at which point they could try to deliver it and we would couldn’t pick it up. Maybe delaying us getting internet for 5-7 hours, at this point, anything longer then 1 hour seemed like eternity.
I wake up, and danielle’s freaking out, they shipped it! (sent the package out for delivery). Our worst dreams for that day had come true. We head to the car to go talk to the UPS people face to face, the phone has failed us at this point as a reliable means of communication. We get out to the sidewalk and what do we see, a UPS truck! A miracle, so we run over there, and ask him for our modem. He isn’t our driver. (Oh the misery!) We do get the name of our UPS truck driver, and proceed to the UPS warehouse. Then, we see another UPS truck, and see if he’s our driver. Nope, but the dude is really good, he knows exactly where the UPS truck is at that moment. We head on over to where we think that is (we are new here), and amazingly Danielle spots him! 5 minutes later we have our modem and all is good with the world.
We get home, and my computer doesn’t even notice my network cards. Kind of crucial for the DSL modem, I end up having to run 6 blocks to work, so I could download the proper drivers for the computer, so I could load the modem. An hour later, the computer is fixed and I’m installing the software for the modem. Success is in our grasps!
20 minutes later, we are on the phone again with ATT, the darn thing wouldn’t connect!
Turns out, this modem is for the service that gets activated on tuesday, and the service that was supposed to be already running is gone again, never to be found. So basically we are screwed with internet till the next day.
Tuesday comes and Danielle is out with Sabrina (her best friend) and its up to me to get the internet setup after the ATT guys hook it up. Around 9 oclock comes around, and we have no internet so I’m on the phone AGAIN with ATT. Everything should be hooked up, but it no workie. So out comes tech support.
Wednesday 4:00pm, I’m at work, Danielle has the tech support guy there. He finally hooks us up properly (umm what did they do on tuesday?), and gets danielle through the setup process.
At around, 5:00pm on Wednesday the 20th, we have The Internet.
This story has been insanely long to type, I’m sure it was just as long to read, and here are some of the things I didn’t even mention.
* Danielle calling ATT and absolutely ripping them a new one. I was truely scared of her at that point, we did end up getting some free service, but it didn’t really make us feel better.
* I cleaned up the computer, reinstalled windows XP on it, did it totally clean, and then our hard drive with all our data on it died.
* Danielle walking through the Ghetto to the Union Square library to use their computers, then getting called some not so pleasant names by the local homeless.
* Both of us getting really really annoyed.
Thank God, it feels great to have the internet.
I understand your frustration. The funny thing is it is all far to common. You would think these professional companies could get their act together? I have had similar experiences more than once. Since I have moved about once a year for the past 11 years, I have had major issues getting internet. Beleive it or not, we are going on year 9 at the dojo and still no internet. We are going to give clearwire a chance since Comcast, ATT, Earthlink, and Qwest cannot deliver anything but dial up or a T-1.
I am happy to hear you have arrived and got the blog up. You have inspired me to update mine.
Miss you and Danielle.
Sabat Sensei was up to visit yesterday. A great event and great time. I have a jo kata now that is really cool.
Hey Tiffany!
Clearwire sounds like it would be perfect for you guys, hope that works out.
Its cool you have a blog, if you give us the link we’ll add it to our blog roll here.