Holding Pattern Eta

AAAGGGGHHHHH!!!!!

OK, now that's out of my system. For now, anyway. Yes, the Saga of the Awful Internet Connection here at Casa Jaquandor continues, with my connectivity woes now reaching Day Five. Oh it makes me mad.

Now, there's the whole "blessing in disguise" thing, yada yada yada, I've been reading a bit more the last few days and I've been writing a bit more too, but still: I like the Internet and I expect it to work, which since last Wednesday it has not. Which annoys me greatly.

Today I finally knuckled under when I got home from work and got EarthLink on the phone. What's happened for days is that the connection is only available for a few minutes at a time (at most), with long periods of connectionlessness in between. Today the "no connection" period lasted, as far as I can tell, overnight and through just about all of today. This sort of thing has happened before, but not in quite a long time, and it's finally become annoying to the point where I'm genuinely considering switching to Verizon FIOS if it's not fixed.

I spent almost two hours on the phone with a service rep with EarthLink, who was very polite and very willing to repeat himself a lot (a necessity, given his very thick Indian accent). He did a good job, although clearly my problem did not get resolved. But it was clear that he was following scripts and decision trees, as there were several times when I tried to offer information that he hadn't asked for, only to have him basically ignore what I had said and plow on to the next point. First we did the "usual" stuff (unplug the modem, wait ten seconds, plug it back in; describe for him my configuration of phone and data cords; et cetera), and when we seemed to have exhausted all of those alternatives, he talked me through some stuff that I didn't know anything about, which seems to have consisted of accessing setup screens and configuration menus and other things I had never seen before.

To his credit, my rep guy at no point sounded at all frustrated as the "Internet" light on the modem refused to come on and stay on, no matter what we did. But it was interesting how obvious it was when we finally reached the final item in his particular bag of tricks, because at that moment, he said "Here's your case reference number, someone will call you within twenty-four hours, have a nice night." And the call ended right then and there. I'm not sure what that means – at one point it sounded as if he was arranging for a tech to pay us a visit to get things figured out, but he didn't say that outright and as of right now I have no idea what the problem here is. I do know that it can't be anything that we did, as we have made zero changes in our Internet setup at home, with no ill effects on the DSL until now.

So here, I am trying to write posts in OpenOffice, paste them into a Blogger window, and "publish" them in the few brief seconds of being connected that I get here and there, once in a while. Hopefully this ends soon....