1) iTunes has Sarah McLachlan singing "Silent Night" as one of their free downloads this week; you should check it out if you like that song and/or Sarah, because it's nice. If you don't like that, they also have The Knife doing "Christmas Reindeer," which is also entertaining. I like both songs better than the James Talor "Jingle Bells" song they had last week. That was crap.
2) Because SOMEONE complained about my lack of a "comments" link, I updated my blogger code and added the "(^o^)" link to the bottom of each post. It doesn't publish your comment on my site, but it opens my "contact me" page in a new window/tab, which will email me your comment just like the "contact me" link at the side of the page will.
I don't have an actual comments section posted on my site because I don't want to have to deal with deleting comments from stupid and/or drunk people. Especially if they're from my stupid and/or drunk friends and/or family (then I'd have some 'splaining to do). I've also known a couple of other people who've had comments posted to their blogs that they wished they could delete, but left up anyway, and I don't want to be in that position. I like that when people respond with lame, judgmental, or even (only a couple of times) offensive comments they only go to my email, and then I can delete them in secret. :)
3) I updated my blogger account to blogger beta through google, and I like it a lot better.
4) I updated my flickr account to be synched up with my yahoo account (because they made me), and it's stupid. I don't understand why that was necessary, yahoo. You're lame.
5) I updated my Firefox to 2.0, and it's rad. I had like, 1.07 or something before (sans add ons) and it was weak, so I always used Safari. But I updated my Firefox on friday and added a bunch of add ons and stuff and it's sooo much better; even better than Safari, so I changed it to my default browser and haven't looked back since.
Also, in the descriptions of one of the add ons (many of which were created by people who speak english as a second language), the creator says that it "automagically create search engines for you." That made me happy, and I think it's a brilliant word - I wish more things in life were automagic.
6) And here we are, at the meat of the post: we updated our phone service to comcast digital voice, and I got a nice reminder of how dumb most people are, and how impersonal large companies can be.
They had a telephone sales person call us back in mid NOVEMBER, and I wanted to switch over anyway (to try and save money, since we have tv and internet through them too), so I set up an appointment for 11/28 (to bypass all the thanksgiving hustle & bustle).
11/28 appointment: time slot is 12-4, guy impresses me by showing up reasonably on time (around 1pm), and wiping his boots at the door. Sees that our current modem is set up in a room w/out a phone jack. Asks no more questions about the state of phone jacks/cable jacks in the rest of our house (they're supposed to give you an extra phone-friendly modem free of charge if your current modem isn't close enough to a phone jack to be replaced). Tosses out a line about how their cables are "really frail in the cold" and how he can't dig in all this snow, and leaves about 2 minutes later.
12/08 appointment: time slot is again 12-4, guy frustrates me by showing up at almost 3pm for a job that I've been told will take about 2hrs. Does not wipe his filthy boots at the door, does not close front door (leaves it WIDE OPEN), repeats this activity about a dozen times (seriously) even after watching me get up and close the door behind him a few times.
Guy pokes around in our house for awhile and decides that the best room to hook the new modem up in is the master bedroom. Then finds out our cable line is too weak, so he installs a new cable line (by creating a new hole in the wall, rather than using the hole created by the previous jack, which he leaves untouched, complete with *dangling* cable line, just above the new one). He runs the new line outside and around the side of our house, where it meets up with a new splitter thingy. He's also attached all of our OLD cable lines to this new ugly thing, even though they used to be under a protective little box (painted the same color as our house). So now all these ugly black/silver/copper bits are exposed on the side of our house waiting to rust in the winter rain.
After he's done all of this, he finds that the PHONE line in our master bedroom is too weak, and proceeds to call comcast in a panic (on speaker phone, in front of me) to try to get another technician out to our house because he doesn't know what he's doing. It's after 4pm on a friday; no one will come help him. Someone does give him instructions for how to fix the problem (it went something like, "oh, that's easy! you just twist the wires together until the [blah blah] shorts, and then [blah blah blah]"). My guy's response to this (again, in front of me) was to whine, "But that'll take forever...I'll be here till 8!"
So he stays until almost 5pm, rips out the phone jack in our kitchen for some unknown reason, switches off our cable tv & internet, *partially* switches our phones over from verizon to comcast, and then tells me he has to have someone more experienced come out to finish the job, because he can't do it on his own. I make him turn the f'ing tv/internet back on (when I ask, he's all like (pause through blank stare...then flash of comprehension), "oh yeah! I can do THAT!"), so he gets the cable back on and he sets up an appointment for the next morning from 8-12. Saturday morning. 8am. And though it was pretty small, we had a party lined up Saturday night that we had to clean/run errands for, so the 8-12 window was pretty frustrating. But I took it because (according to him) the phone in our bedroom would work fine, but all other phone jacks in our house were dead.
12/09 appointment: I stayed up until 3am finishing xmas presents for the people coming over the next night, but since the THIRD comcast technician could show up as early as 8am and needed our bedroom, the alarm went off at 7:50, Brett got up for the morning to wait for him, and I crawled into the guest room to sleep for a couple more hours.
11:45am, 12/09: still no technician. Brett picks up the phone to call comcast on our one working phone to ask what the deal is, and discovers that we have messages on our new comcast vm from people who've tried to get ahold of us and not had our phone ring through. After that discovery, he calls comcast and they say we don't even have an appointment scheduled. Brett is told that they'll call our technician from the day before to see what's up, and call us back in a minute.
12:15pm, 12/09: I'm cleaning the bathroom, and Brett's in the shower. I ask him what comcast said, and he says they still haven't called back. I pick up the phone to call them, and find that we have a new message. I instinctively dial our verizon vm but that's okay, because that's where the message is.
It turns out that calls are being routed to either our comcast vm OR verizon vm, depending on where they're calling from. So the message on our verizon vm is from comcast, and the guy says that we DO have an appointment but our technician is running late (thanks for calling us, technician), so he'll be there at 2pm. Which doesn't work, because our party starts at 4pm, and I was going to shower AFTER I was done cleaning - at 2pm. And our master suite is kind of funky: the bedroom & bathroom just kind of meld together; there's no actual door to the bathroom.
So I call comcast back, schedule ANOTHER appointment for Sunday afternoon, and also let them know that we can make outgoing calls on our one, sad little phone jack, but apparently incoming calls go straight to one of two different vms. I'm told that they'll let our technician for Sunday know what's up.
1:30pm, 12/09: Our Saturday technician calls my cellphone (I left my number on our home vm so people could get ahold of us) to say that it looks like he's not going to be able to make it out to our house. Um...good, because I'll be in the shower in about 20 minutes. So I let him know that we already CANCELED our appointment with him, and set up a new one for the next day. He then questions me about our inability to receive incoming calls, and actually SEEMS SKEPTICAL that I might not know what I'm talking about. I'm like, "hello...you just called & got my vm message - it never rang here once!" So he's like, "well, maybe the ringer's off, 'cause if it's plugged into the modem, it should work..." and I'm like, "duh...the ringer's on high, it's plugged into the modem, and the caller id says we haven't had a call since 12/09. OUR CALLS ARE NOT GETTING THROUGH." Then I even suggested to HIM that maybe the fact that some of our calls were still going to our verizon vm meant that our service hadn't been completely switched over, and his response to that was, "well...I don't know...if the phone's plugged into the modem it should work."
Anyway. Moving on...
12/10 appointment: the window is from 12-4 again, and I think technician #4 showed up around 2pm. Wiped his feet. Was friendly and non-accusatory. Saw the mess of wires and cables in our bedroom and acknowledged that it was a mess. Didn't do much to CLEAN UP the mess, but still acknowledged it, and fixed the technical problems in about 20 minutes time. Fixed the phone line so that ALL our jacks worked, and not just one. Discovered that we weren't receiving incoming calls because our service had only partially been transferred over from verizon (!!!), and completed the transfer so we could receive calls. Saw the busted up jack in the kitchen, and fixed that too. Even pointed out that on friday, technician #2 had plugged the modem into a power outlet that goes on/off with our lightswitch (it's usually left on, and was on at the time, but he STILL noticed and STILL let us know), and he plugged it into a different outlet.
As of this morning, things seemed perfect; the phones work great, tv, internet...it looked like guy #4 had finally straightened everything out. And then I got a call from [anonymous media research company], saying that one of our boxes hadn't reported any data for the last few days. She suggested that maybe the power outages we've been having lately (because of all our stormy weather) had caused a problem, but I went into our bedroom to check on it and the power light was on. They receive reports on our television data over the phone, so I mentioned that transferred to digital voice over the weekend and asked if that could've caused a problem.
She said that for some reason their equipment sometimes has trouble communicating over digital lines, and said they'd arrange to have a separate, standard phone line installed (at their expense) for the boxes to use. It was at this point that I happened to look over at the phone jack in our bedroom, and I noticed that the separate wires that usually come out the side of the jack and go to the [anonymous media research company] box were MISSING. I found the end of the wires that attach to the data box itself, and pulled on them until I found the end. Which had been tucked behind my bedside table after having been ripped from the wall (probably by technician #2).
So now the girl from [anonymous media research company] has to come out tomorrow to hook their wires back up, and then we'll have another phone line installed, and then they'll probably have to come back out and hook their boxes up to the NEW phone line, and by then we may even have a new (or new to us) tv, so they'll have to come out AGAIN to bug the new tv.
Rarg. I love being part of the [anonymous media research company] pool, and I love their service people AND their phone support, but I'm *so tired* of having service people at the house. For reals. Wow...this suddenly makes me feel really badly for my sister, who's been having her house remodeled for like, the last year and a half or something. Sheesh.
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