posted 12-02-2001 16:12            

While I was sitting last night kinda gloating as I watched people suddenly dissapear as their connections were shut off I thought to myself "Gee, good thing I got off of @home a few weeks ago."

But then, between 1 and 2am the lights started to blink as the modem tried to reset itself.

"Oh well" I thought, "This happens about once a week, its time to go to bed and all will be fine in the morning."

It wasn't. By the time I woke up (after noon) the lights were still blinking and the connection was still nonexistant.

Funny... I look at the modem diagnostics, and see that its finding the recieve frequency, and sees a send frequency, but cannot connect to get its configuration.

So... I called the cable company. "No problem" they say, "We'll have a guy out there tomorrow".

Ok... wow... they're sending a technician to my house free of charge on a Sunday.

Technician comes to my house before noon. Looks at the cable modem and goes to the computer.

I'm running windows 2000... he looked at the screen confused until I logged into the admin account for him. He goes to the run command and types "winipcfg".

I say nothing. I just sit and watch.

"There seems to be a problem with your computer" he says. "It wont let me see your ip settings when I type winip.."

"--Thats windows 2000." I say, interupting him.

I then proceed to show him how to view the settings he's looking for. Then, as a nice gesture, I open up the modem configuration page.

He radios his "base", and they tell him to replace the modem. Of course, the new modem doesn't work either.

Long story short: Somewhere in a rush to convert 25,000 people off of @home in the last few weeks they've forgotten to plug a few of them in, or have configured them incorrectly.

The problem is, of course, not on my end. I wasn't supposed to be on @home anymore... I had made sure 2 weeks ago I was off of it... and chances are I was but something broke.

"Well... they've made a note of it, and I'd say that if you aren't back up by Monday afternoon, then you should call and bitch again." Was his parting words of comfort.

While it was nice to get next day service, and a new modem, I'm still rather disheartened.

Of course, unconfirmed rumor has it that AT&T has been rather slow in honoring the requests of competing ISP's around the country in the sudden need for high-speed data lines. Gee... if its true I wouldn't be surprised. Of course it also means slower service during peak hours when the ISP's are running low on bandwidth, doesn't it

More irony: I gave my old 56k modem back to my parents about a month or two ago, when they were looking for one to give to my sister. This means that the only thing I have to steal my dialup service with is a work laptop.