Sorry for the lack of posts the last few days, but I’ve come to find out that being able to connect to the internet is somewhat important to being able to blog. Well, as I said the other day, like George Costanza, I’m back, baby!
So, our internet problems started last weekend when our connection became intermittent. It would be connected, go out for 10 minutes, come back on for five, go back out. No amount of power cycling was going to fix this. I was going to have to buckle down and call Charter.
Now, anyone in the St. Louis area, if you can avoid Charter, DO IT. It is quite possibly the worst company in the area, most certainly the worst television provider. Their service is spotty, and their customer service is atrocious.
So, Wednesday night I decided to give it a shot. I talked with an Indian man who walked me through a bunch of steps, most of which I’d already tried, for 45 minutes before telling me he thought my modem was bad and to take it to the office and exchange it. We could have covered that in five minutes.
So, Thursday rolls around, and I take the modem back to Charter after work. I’m the only person in there, surprisingly, and the guy behind the counter is very nice, really courteous and extremely helpful…a first in dealing with Charter. He tells me to call and have them ‘provision’ the modem after I set it up.
I get home, set it up, call Charter, the guy provisions my modem, we’re up and running. It’s all good…for about 10 minutes, then it craps the bed again, but this time won’t come back at all. I have no choice, I have to call again.
Now, there are several steps, which the Indian people on the other line make you walk through no matter how many times you tell them you did already and you just need someone to come out. So, I did them again up to the point where I plug the modem directly into the computer. I got no signal. The lady on the other end kept telling me ‘you should have flashing PC activity light.’ I didn’t. She wouldn’t listen to what I was saying, and I’m pretty sure hung up on me, because I was ‘disconnected.’
So, I had to call back again. Yes, that’s the fourth phone call in two days. Awesome. Now, I was still plugged up directly to the modem not getting a signal. The guy on the phone decided something was wrong and scheduled an appointment for Sunday morning…between 8:00 - Noon.
Friday and Saturday passed with no internet but much sushi, as Wendy and I ate at sushi places Friday and Saturday night. Friday at the Drunken Fish, just the two of us, and Saturday with our usual group of friends. Friday night we also had dessert in the form of these strawberry cheesecake things made to look like sushi rolls. They’re amazing…but not so amazing for the diet. We’ll get there in a minute, though…
Sunday morning rolls around and Wendy and I are trying to figure out if we can get down to the Rams game or not when 10:30 hits and the cable guy hasn’t shown up. Finally, the dude shows up, checks everything out and a couple of discoveries are made. 1. The connection is fine. 2. The wired Network card on my laptop is shot. 3. The router is shot.
This made me mad, mostly because it wasn’t Charter’s fault at all that the internet wasn’t working. But you see, I switched routers on Thursday since we had an extra one, and I still couldn’t connect to it…because my network card was broken. Well, Wendy’s new laptop was fine, so I had to use that. I plugged the new router directly into her laptop, attempted to get into the setup menu, but the router wouldn’t work with Windows Vista. It needed a firmware upgrade. No big deal, I’ll just go download it from the D-Link website.
Well, they don’t make this router anymore…so they don’t make the firmware for Vista. I can’t hook up to my computer, which is running XP, because the network card is broken. I had no choice but to go get a new router, which I did. Then I had to hook it up through Vista, which was way more difficult than it should have been. I was celebrating like I won the World Series when I got it hooked up and working…finally, we were back online late Sunday night.
That’s the saga that has taken the place of my life for the last week. Well, lucky for you (not), I’m back…but I’m only one pound lighter….the dessert certainly took its toll on me. At least I’m going in the right direction still, but I was hoping for a better week last week because Thanksgiving is only a couple days away. I’ll have to do my best this week leading up to Thursday to avoid heading into the positive.
Song of the Day: Love Lockdown - Kanye West. With the release of Kanye’s new album this week, I thought the first single off that album would be an appropriate song of the day. The song isn’t my favorite from Kanye, but it’s growing on me.
Let’s hope for a good week.
More tomorrow.
-Brett
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