I think it's time I make a new category.. "rants and bitching".. well maybe tomorrow.

I had an appointment with a tech today, between 11-1pm. The tech did show up, in his nice truck with freshly painted "Comcast" lettering over where AT&T used to be and TCI before that. Showed up, never bothered to leave the truck, ring the doorbell or any of the usual things one would expect of a service person. Then left and as I found out later was nice enough to close my ticket for me as well. That's right, without fixing a damn thing.

Called customer service (who else?). They seemed concerned (hah, funny) about my problems and said the tech claimed nobody was home. How nice of them to hire obviously psychic techs since he never bothered to check if someone was home. Hm, perhaps he was afraid of the gang of 5 year olds running on my street because that's the scariest thing in my neighborhood as far as I can tell. Well, either that or my neighbor's chihuaua. That dog can be quite loud. So, back to customer service.. they said they would have someone from the local market dispatch call me back within two hours. (Hey, at the very least I'm really learning all this cool cable-internet-lingo).

Two hours later, no call back. Hah! Bet you didn't expect that result, well I didn't, I still had faith. Of course I called them again.. this time I got to talk with a very-important sounding supervisor. I got a very apologetic "no really, they will call you back in 30-45 minutes, please don't call us back before then" -- they learned to love me by now.

An hour later, of course, no phone call. More customer service calls, more supervisors, more promises.. and a result of.. "we can get a tech out on the 13th".

Uhm, no. I am not waiting until the 13th to have my Internet access restored, especially considering what I suspect the reason for the disconnect is. My lack of subscription to cable tv and an overzealous technician. So, so far the result is: they will try to get a tech out tomorrow morning. I'm not holding my breath.

In the meantime, I subscribed to Verizon's express network.. 110K connection on my cell phone which is connected to my laptop. It's pretty nice! Well, was while it was working which it is not anymore. It stopped for no particular reason and I'm currently on the phone with Verizon's tech support (some really nice guy from California has been on this with me for the last hour or so.. but it's still not bloody working (he laughed at my lame jokes, he must be nice (hey, I'm nesting parens!))) and trying to get it to work. Sigh.

I'm cursed.

Well, if nothing else I learned how to get into the setup menu on my phone using the Verizon (maybe it's Motorola, dunno) secret access code. Lots of nifty options there to play with but considering my recent luck with all things electronic I think I'll restrain myself from doing so.