we do…
don’t like having the moles… matter of fact every time i see one of their *&%#$* piles of dirt it makes me just about friggin’ lose my mind…
so we have acquired ourselves some “mole be gone”… which the lovely and talented karen applied the affected areas on saturday… we shall hope for results…
so help me if i need to i’ll call the mole guy…
my final post about dsl… i promise…
yesterday a technician dude came to the casa… after pokin’ around for 10 minutes he reported back that there was never any chance that dsl would work here (at 3.0 speed)… nice… seems you gotta be 10,000 feet from some kinda hub… and we’re… wait for it… 15,000 feet away…
seems to me like someone shoulda noticed that on the front end of the whole transaction… or been able to do some investigating along the way during our troubleshooting adventures…
ah well… que sera sera and all that… service cancelled… hardware on the way back… we’ll stick with cable which is running at 3.9 speed according to a speed test i just did (and will be benchmarked at 6.0 by summer’s end according to customer service there)…
the speed test site i used is www.dslreports.com/stest… thought it was pretty cool…
onward…
sun’s shining… weekend’s imminent… life is good…
so yesterday morning i spoke with a new pal at verizon, theodora… she spoke very quietly… after about 45 minutes of troubleshooting and my asking her to speak up about 45 times she decided that perhaps it was best that i wait until after 6:00 pm… because “sometimes that helps”… wow…
6:45pm… i met yet another new amigo, tom… tom actually knew what he was talking about… yay… but surprise… dsl still doesn’t work… he was, however, on the ball enough to realize that there was a problem with the line… perish the thought - something may have been hosed up on verizon’s end of the deal… and i should get a call from a technician soon to get it all squared away… attaboy tom…
i couldn’t help but ask my newest pal tom about my first lil’ chat with my oldest pal jeremy… turns out ol’ jeremy was/is a putz… everything shoulda been working on friday… gee… feels nice to be right… it’d feel nicer to be right and have dsl working…
wow…
we got a voice mail from james earl jones on saturday alerting us to the fact that our verizon dsl service was up and running and we should install our new software post-haste…
apparently communications between my old pal jeremy and my new pal mr. jones are less than perfect… dsl still doesn’t work…
was nice of him to call though…
congratulations to the laceys!!!…
their newest addition, jasmine susan, was born yesterday morning!!!… guitar player steve talks about events here…
way to go amigos
wheee!!!…
so today our pals the laceys, dad being guitar player steve, will be welcoming their newest addition - jasmine!!!… way to go laceys… i’m very much looking forward to meeting the little lady…
and as a bonus lacey offspring #1, julian, is gonna come hang out with us whilst all the new baby birthin’ is going on… kenzie’s excited to have a guest today and so am i…
new babies make me happy…
so we’ve had internet service through the cable company for a while now… had dsl before but switched to cable as part of a promo with cable tv…
’s been fine… no problems… but its kinda expensive… and we now have direct tv instead of cable…
so we decided to jump back to dsl… this time with verizon, who our phone line is with… supposedly its good and by my figurin’ its gonna save us about 270 bucks over the next year…
so i order online on tuesday… get flooded with emails thanking me and giving me updates about how the work’s going to get us ready for dsl… including one that says our go-live date will be the next tuesday the 23rd…
so yesterday was the 19th… the box o’ hardware arrives… as does an email that says… and i quote…
-
“Congratulations and welcome to Verizon Online DSL!
Your Verizon Online DSL service is ready on telephone line ***-***-****.
If you ordered a Verizon Online Self-Install Kit and have not received it, please call us right away at 1-800-567-6789. If you are installing the service yourself, you can start now by inserting the Install CD found in your Self-Install Kit and following the step-by-step instructions.
Don’t wait another minute! Set up your DSL service today and make this the last day you have to use dial-up. You’ll be exploring more, downloading more and achieving more online with your new DSL connection.
When you’re up and running, be sure to check out Broadband Beat at http://broadbandbeat.verizon.net for movie trailers, games, music and other cool things you can do with broadband.
Have questions? The fastest and easiest way to find answers to your DSL questions is to go online at http://www.verizon.net/help. Or, call us at 1-800-567-6789.
Thank you for choosing Verizon Online as your DSL service provider. Your business is important to us. “
-
… my emphasis of course…
well i’m friggin impressed… they got the service turned on 4 days early… shipped the hardware to me fast… life is good…
impressed, that is, until i try to install everything and it keeps hanging up on the final account setup screen… seems to be seeing the modem… seems to be connecting to something somewhere and trading data… but no love on the final phase of setup…
so i make the dreaded call(s)… two times through the phone tree to figure out where i need to be… another call during which i was hung up on whilst in queue… and on lucky call number four, after being told the wait time would be less than ten minutes, a mere twenty minutes later i had the privilege of speaking with jeremy…
jeremy punched up our number and promptly told me, with a little chuckle and a tinge of yer-an-idiot-mister-customer tone, that our service was set to be active on the 23rd… yes jeremy… i’m fully aware that was the plan but it seems like you guys are so great that you did better than you thought and got it ready today as is, in my eyes, rather explicitly detailed in this email y’all sent me just a couple of hours ago…
hmmnn… that stumped him… after flailing about for a minute or two with no results in the way of getting our service to work he decided that the email was sent in error… and if we try to install everything on tuesday it’ll all probably work out just fine…
well… it better…
i’ll reserve judgement on the email-was-sent-out-too-early hypothesis until then…
i’ll go ahead and weigh in on the whole customer service aspect of the experience though…
jeremy… you’re a tech service guy whose job it is to troubleshoot problems and help the customers of your company… you are verizon to everyone that calls in needing help… i’m huge on customer service… as corny as it sounds it’s pretty much a passion with me… and you my friend certainly hosed the opportunity to make this into a positive experience for me… no apology… no empathy… jeez… if you don’t like what you’re doing go do something else… you’d be doing yourself a favor… and probably a whole bunch of other folks too…
… to be continued…
i posit that if one can’t operate an atm machine one shouldn’t be allowed to have a driver’s license…
furthermore, i’d suggest that anyone who happens to be in front of me at a drive up atm without a clue as to how to use it should pretty much be eliminated from the gene pool… survival of the fittest… thinning o’ the herd… etc…
at least those were my thoughts yesterday afternoon as i sat in line , in the hot-rod minivan with two somewhat cranky kids, behind a gentleman and watched him put his card, the same card, in the magic wall five times with utterly no success…
here’s a tip for all you atm neophytes out there… if you’re not getting the answer you want from the thing after trying maybe two or three times… doing it over and over again isn’t going to help… park the car… go inside… ask for assistance…
the life you save may be your own…
so what a fun weekend that was…
did the picnic and sushi stuff on friday…
hosted the wedding shower for our pal sarah on saturday… that was a blast…
and had a swell barbecue on sunday to round out the weekend…
i’d like every weekend to be as good as that…
and to top it off… we got a new mower… sweet…
so we kicked off the weekend yesterday with les chilluns and i picking mum up from work early so we could go to her company picnic… this the fifth one of these that i’ve been fortunate enough to attend… i dig all of karen’s colleagues so they’re always fun… and yesterday we all had a particularly spectacular time… it was held at lincoln park in west seattle which was really cool… couldn’t have asked for a more beautiful day and we were right down by the beach… little people had fun… big people had fun… was a great time…
upon our triumphant return to the casa our pals samantha and jessica came over to hang out with tugboat and kenzie… allowing karen and i to have a date night… those are a little rare these days so we’d been looking forward to it big time… we went to the sake house in downtown kirkland… walked in… found ourselves a couple of seats at the sushi bar…ordered some sake… and told the itamae, or sushi chef dude, that we were in his hands and to make us whatver he felt like… it was amazing… the sake house has never failed to impress but last night was extra great… tried some new things… drank lotsa sake… had a great time with the love of my life…
a superb start to the weekend…
