Okay, I’m back from a few days off that were mandated by a Comcast outage – AGAIN. The one thing I really hate about living in a small town is the lack of choices. If I could get any type of DSL or other high-speed Internet alternative they would have my business in a heartbeat. But there is nothing else. Maybe I’ll go back to dial-up…. *shudder*

See it all started Thursday night when I got home from work. The modem wasn’t syncing up. Called Comcast they said they would send someone out on Friday. Later that night service was up and running again so I figured it was just their typical lack of communication from area of the company to the other and the customer service rep just didn’t know about an outage. Canceled the appointment Friday and Friday night – service is out again. Call them back and they tell me they will send someone Saturday afternoon. We didn’t have any plans so I agreed.

Fast forward to Saturday. The tech was supposed to come out Saturday between 12pm-4pm. At 2:45pm someone calls my cell phone from a number in another state. It’s the dispatch company looking for their tech because they can’t find him anywhere and they wondered if he had been to my house yet. Yeah, not a good sign. They assure me I am the next appointment on his list and he will be here by 4pm. 4pm comes and goes, I call back to the out-of-state number and they tell me they will try to reach him and get an ETA and call me back. 4:15pm they call to say he will be here by 5pm. 5:30pm – no tech.

So I call the dispatch company back and this time the person that answers the phone is rude. I tell her he hasn’t shown up yet and she says to me “I don’t know what traffic is like where you are but here where I am it’s a nightmare at 5pm. He’ll be there when he can get there.” I was stunned because her tone was very rude and I wanted to put her back in her place right then and there but I opted instead to call Comcast and file a formal complaint.

I know it’s not unusual for the techs to show up much later than they are scheduled for; my real issue was the treatment by the dispatch company. They are the ones that started calling my house looking for their employee. They are the ones that called me, telling me they had spoken to him and that he was driving to my house at that very moment and would be there in 45 minutes. And then they were the ones that got an attitude.

Results? A credit to my account equivalent to two months service and the tech showed up at 6:30pm. He swapped out my modem and then couldn’t get it online. He finally gave up and said it was a maintenance issue and left. I went on the computer and could download email but couldn’t get a browser window to load. Hmm. That’s strange. I then went into the LAN settings and they were wrong. I fixed them myself and we have been online ever since. Good thing the tech finally showed up, huh? *pfffftttttt

Hi guys

I’m having some issues with my comments - namely not receiving the email notification that one of you left me a message on a post.

So I need your help. Can you please leave a comment on this post, even if it’s just to say hi and nothing else so I can make sure my host was able to fix it? I would be totally lost without this function.

Thanks!!

I may not post much this weekend because of this and this and this. So much for NaBloPoMo. Oh well, it will give me more time with my girls Time they need. Have a good weekend!

I just spent the last half hour trying to fix yesterday’s post because something in it was making my sidebar drop down to the bottom of the page. Arrgghh, I hate IE. You can bet it doesn’t happen in Firefox. But half my readers still use IE so I want my blog to look good in both browsers. Stupid IE. Really, if you’re still using IE you have to consider downloading and using Firefox - it so rocks. Try it out. If you hate it just uninstall it and go back to IE. Come on, what do you have to lose?

Yesterday when I was writing my post about being adopted and finding my birth parents I tapped into some anger about their reason for giving me up that I thought I had dealt with 7 years ago. I guess there are still some strong feelings - some need to call my birth parents out. I also came to the realization that the reason I have been coming up with excuses/reasons not to go back to school and pursue my career is directly related to this very issue. I finally understood yesterday that I didn’t want to leave my children in the name of a job/career the way I felt I had been left. Not that pursuing a career would mean abandoning or giving up my children entirely but it would to a point - in my mind anyway.

I shut down after that. I have a hard time facing pain; I always have and typically use food to numb out so I don’t have to feel when it gets too tough. I found myself eating junk and staring at the computer screen for way too many hours after that realization. I easily lost half the day. It took every bit of strength I could muster to drag myself out of my chair and DO something. Anything. I knew this time what I was doing though and I pushed myself to get up and get moving - fight the immobility. I cleaned up the house first, took a shower and then began the arduous task of setting up and switching around the computers in the house.

My husband got a new computer from Dell - a nice buy for the price - so I needed to start shuffling systems around to hook his up. The one J had is going in N’s room, the one in N’s room is going out in the playroom for the girls to play their Jumpstart games on and then the new one is going in J’s office. The first struggle was in moving N’s out to the playroom. He has a wireless mouse and keyboard and wanted to keep them so I tried to hook up a different mouse that we had kicking around. The computer didn’t recognize it and wanted the software disc to install it. *sigh* After 20 minutes I gave up searching and told N that his wireless stuff was going out in the playroom for now until I found an old-world mouse I could put out there.

Then I moved J’s down to N’s room. This was truly an uneventful installation until I tried to get it on the network. But I didn’t try that until after I had set up J’s. His is the hub of our home network so I needed to get his running before I could worry about the others. Hooked J’s up - spent 30 minutes tearing apart the house for the printer disc, finally found it after many expletives under my breath, got the printer installed and then went back to N’s room to finish his.

All went well until I tried to link to the network. The computer found it just fine but when I went to connect it asked for the security key. The one I set up for no good reason that I can figure out now. The one I couldn’t find written down ANYWHERE. The one I can only access through the management tool of the networking software that is installed on N’s (formerly J’s) computer and needs to be attached to the base station which is up in J’s office. So today I have to bring the tower back upstairs and hope that I can reconnect it without incident (ROFL - I kill myself, computer work without issues, too funny) and get the @#$%^ security key and write it down and put it in a safe place or eliminate it altogether. I really don’t think there’s much risk of anyone tapping into our wireless network out here.

This morning J told me he thought I needed to get to bed earlier so that I wasn’t so cranky and short in the middle of the afternoon. Yeah, okay J, whatever.