My Call Is Very Important To Them

I've told you about my internet service provider Spiretech before. You call them up and someone answers on the first ringy-dingy. They fix what's wrong. Twice they even had me bring in my computer--they're right in town--and decontaminated it for free and got its vaccinations up to date.

But the best they can do for me is DSL through the phone company, and not the fast kind, either. It's way better than dial-up of course but there are problems. More and more my computer acts like it's taken in a bolus of data and it can't swallow. I really need an internet service with a bigger esophagus.

So I was ripe for the picking when I got a cold call from the phone company offering me super duper fiber based speed-of-light internet service, and if I signed up today they'd throw in extra fiber, and vitamins and minerals and TV. And candy through the mail slot. I signed up. I hated to do it. Poor old Spiretech. They've been so good to me. And now I'd have to change my email address and probably about a thousand usernames. On the plus side, I'd be able to send Comcast packing for my TV connection. Everybody hates Comcast.

We shook over the phone, the salesman and I, and he promised to send an installer by on October 16th and email me a raft of information about what I'd agreed to, and that was that. And that was two weeks ago. And no email. I did scrawl a confirmation number on an envelope I managed to not recycle. So today I called up and asked for my information. Well!

The hold music was peppy. There was a boogie-woogie element to it that I approved of. I waited only a couple minutes and then got a guy who knew a guy and I got put on hold again so he could connect me to the guy he knew.

That guy was popular, all right. He didn't come to the phone for another ten minutes, during which time I was able to ascertain that the boogie-woogie element was but one segment in a medley that included a Europop offering that got old quick. "Logan," once he showed up, had a nice voice that appeared to originate in this country. So that was innovative. We talked. He had to put me on hold to check my status.

And that status was that I hadn't gotten an email because someone (else) put my order in wrong, and he wasn't sure if anyone was really coming out on October 16th or not. Did I remember what I'd signed up for? Well, I thought it was the whole works. Did I remember how much I was supposed to pay? Not really. All that was supposed to be in the confirmation email. Logan didn't know what I was getting, or when I was getting it. He suggested we start over. Fine! But before he could start over, he needed to make sure my other order was not merely dead but really most sincerely dead, so that my orders wouldn't trip over each other on the way to my house. He put me on hold.

Really, the boogie-woogie element wasn't that great. I mean, all boogie-woogie is just fine, but the bridge was lame, and the refrain was totally derivative. The segue was a complete rip-off from the Doobie Brothers. They should sue.

Logan checked in periodically to see if I was still there, and I was. Because my cell phone keeps track of such things, I noted that I had now been on the phone for 64 minutes. You don't give up. It's the Vietnam War syndrome. We've already lost 50,000 of our boys, and it would be a dishonor to their memory if we didn't sacrifice a few more platoons.

Logan came back on. "Mary? Are you there?" I'm here! I shouted into the phone, like a trapped coal miner. Can you hear me?

Apparently not. The hold music was off, and I heard random clicking from his keyboard, and also the entire conversation of the woman working next to him. She just had her toenails done. I know! But sometime you just got to do things just for you own self, am I right?

Logan came back on every two minutes or so to see if I was still there, but he didn't answer when I bellowed back. It was clear he could not hear me. I began to consider hanging up. I thought back: was this phone call being recorded for quality purposes? I sincerely hoped so. I didn't remember. That would have been--check the phone--79 minutes ago. Then the phone went dead.

A few seconds later my land line rang. It was Logan, clever dude. He was pretty sure he'd gotten to the bottom of the problem. So we were going to start over. Next Tuesday.

"Is that when you're sending someone out to hook me up?"

No. He'd call me next Tuesday to place the order. I didn't ask why we couldn't do it now. I was too happy we weren't going to do it now. I'm going to send Logan a Christmas fruitcake, I'm so grateful we aren't doing it now.

Jacking In The Crawl Space

In the basement, where we maintain a warren of electrical wiring of mysterious function, we just had a bunch of new electricity put in. It's shiny and serious-looking and when the electrician was done installing it, he said I should go turn everything on again to see if the new electricity had intimidated any of the old electricity. We've got some old knob-and-tube stuff that is nearly Amish, as well as some old new electricity that goes to an electrical panel and some newer new electricity that got added on, plus odds and ends like a burglar alarm and a jack for the DSL, which was the newest kid on the block a while back.

I turned everything on and it hummed and lit up and did everything it was supposed to, except for the DSL. I had no internet. Before fourteen years ago I never had any internet, but now it's the second-most important electricity we've got, after whatever keeps the beer cold. The internet, being the baby of the electrical family, had always been prone to tantrums. Sometimes it would sit and hold its breath till it turned blue, sometimes it would stamp its feet and sometimes it would just drag along behind us scuffing its heels and pouting. I've maintained low expectations for it, which it has met.

This time it wouldn't even flicker. It had grown into a sullen teenager. Where are you going, young lady? we would demand, and all we'd get is "OUT!" and a slammed door. I called my splendid ISP, Spire Technologies, where warm humans leap to answer the phone on the first ring and set to fixing your problems in (A) a jiffy and (B) English. Alex was able to confirm I had no internet, and confirm exactly how much internet I didn't have and how badly I didn't have it, and he roped the DSL people at Qwest into the conversation. Everyone agreed I was sorely lacking, and Qwest promised to send someone out the next day.

An hour later I happened to notice I had internet again, so I lassoed up a batch of emails, one of which was from Qwest confirming they'd be sending someone over to find my internet, so it's a good thing I got it back in time to get the e-mail. There was a phone number there I could use to cancel my appointment, and I called it. The fellow who answered was not human but still sounded helpful. "I see you have two services. Are you calling about the phone or the DSL?" DSL, I bellowed into the phone. The non-human wanted to run some tests and he'd be right back. When he came back, after a disturbing Europop interlude, he said it looks like I have my internet connection now, and if I was still having problems I should contact my ISP, and he was ever so sorry, but he didn't know their number. Buh-bye!

So I couldn't cancel my appointment. Fortunately, the internet went out again (slam) and then came back, and a few hours later it did it again (slam). Hormones, I swear to God. So although I was confident it would be working when the serviceman arrived--it's sort of a twist on Murphy's Law--I made no further attempts to ward him off.

Well, Donald from Qwest was just a peach. He fiddled with something near my modem, and then he fiddled with something stuck on the outside of the house, and then he kindly explained to me that my DB level was "four" and what I'd probably want to do is do a home run from the network interface to the jack. Well, sure, I'd like to, but I could never get anything out of the infield. I presented him with a very blank face. He explained I might want to replace a wire from the SNI to the old protector. He peered into my eyes in time to see the pilot light go out. I was blank clear down to my pancreas. Finally I accessed the part of my brain responsible for speech and asked him if all of that was something he could do, if I had enough money. And it turns out it was. Having reliable internet service would be something I would think you just couldn't put a price tag on, but it turns out it's $85.

Before he left, I asked him one more time if he could tell me what he'd done with the home run, and he patiently explained that my DSL doesn't run in series with the other jacks, unless it does it in the crawl space where we can't see it. He left after confirming that things were looking brighter with my internet, but my heart sank just a little. There are all sorts of things jacking away in the crawl space where we can't see them. We've found their little pellets.

But the internet didn't go out again for another five hours, and that's something.

Packet Droppings

My computer started to sludge up a few days ago. I did the same thing I do with my other relationships: I pretended it was all in my imagination and everything would be fine the next day. It was sludgier the next day. I had a poke at downloading updates and subjecting my anti-virus program to disciplinary action, but the sludge remained. It took me a day and a half to get my rat photo sucked up into the blog, and it wasn't that great a photo. I don't like my own blog judging me. I shut the whole machine down and sent it to its room. Wait till your father gets home, I said. I was peeved.

One of the worst months of my life was spent dealing with an internet service provider when I couldn't get any mail to go to or fro, which is really about all I was asking it to do. Every day off for a month I was on the phone to my new friends in India (Victoria and Alexander, I believe they said), who spent hours emptying my computer until it was cleaner than a colonoscopy patient. Then they filled it back up with jellybeans and joy and pronounced it healed, and hung up, and I tried to send an email, and I got the same error window (accompanied by an orchestral chord of doom that, to this day, will send me to my knees), and then I burst into tears. How I could be made so miserable with technology I had managed to live without for forty years? That's when friend told me about a local ISP, Spiretech.com. They are so local I can see them without a passport--I mean, they're right over there--and when I call them up, I get two ringy-dingies and then, bam, a human being comes on the line. And it's usually a human being with a mass of monitors and such in front of him and a calm voice and the ability to see what's inside my computer and possibly my very soul. Then we all get in the balloon and fly back to Kansas. No, they really exist.

So when my computer pouted and refrained from even sending email this morning, I called up my friends at SpireTech. Got Jaysen on the second ring. He never laughs at me except in the right places. He got to work right away and determined that I had 25,408 errors. That's a lot even for me. Furthermore--he informed me with a gratifying tone of awe--I was dropping packets like crazy. Why, I was at a layer two packet loss. It was like I was picking up a packet and then dropping it right away, picking up another packet and dropping it, he explained. I thought I felt something. I used to have an old guy on my mail route who dropped packets in every way you can think of. His brain had thinned out alarmingly, for one thing; but also, when I gave him his mail, before I learned to put a rubber band on it, he would drop one letter, drop another in the act of picking it up, bend over and pick that one up, drop another, and so on and so forth, until he'd done a complete circle and was back at the mailboxes. Then he'd look for more mail. If he could have done this starting at his apartment door, he'd have had an easier time finding his way home, which had gotten to be an issue.

"So this is bad, these 25,000 errors and the severe packet droppings?" I asked Jaysen. He said it wasn't good. This actually made me feel better, that someone in a remote location was able to document that I was truly sludgy and not just whiny. He got my DSL provider, Qwest, on the line, and we had ourselves a jolly little three-way for a while, during which Jason advocated for me and even tried to spank the Qwest fellow right through the phone on my behalf, but the Qwest fellow was a friend of Victoria's and Alexander's and just as unflappable. I tried crawling under the table and messing with the wires with the cat on my back, and then I tried with the cat on my modem. I believe we left off with the solution that someone from the phone company was going to come out and knock squirrels off my lines, and then we'd see. The main point, as I see it, is it isn't my fault.