Flibbertigibbet

I'm Stealing Internet Right Now

When I got home from work on Friday, I found that I had no internet connection and my cable was out. Immediately, I called Time Warner to report the problem. They said there was an outage.

On Saturday, when it seemed like every single one of my friends was busy or pretending like they have lives apart from the time that coincides with mind, I called again. No update or progress.

Today, I walked into my building and this dude from the second floor was complaining loudly about it.

Sidebar: Dude's body is awesome. His face isn't all that, but his current haircut really works for him. I know about his body because when it's warm out he walks his dog without a shirt on. His body is so good, you miss the face. And it's not his whole face, it's his teeth. He has a huge space in between his front two teeth. But his abs and pecs and the lines created by his obliques... um...

He was complaining about the outage.

Apparently, not everyone in the building was out of service. That is not symptomatic of an "outage."

No. The problem was that they were supposed to switch us all over to a new network, but failed to do so and when they shut down the old network, those of us, including myself, lost service.

The kind folks at Time Warner implied a couple of times that I was to blame for not scheduling an appointment to be changed over. Unfortunately, I was able to throw their own records in their face and pointed out that on September 13th, I was in fact home and I did speak with TWO technicians who both said they could not complete the change over due to some technical problem.

As it turns out, those technicians failed to follow up on the issue. And so, we were never switched over.

When I called back this evening with this new information, I was in a fit. They admitted the wrongdoing, but said that the earliest they could get here to fix it was December 13th.

UNACCEPTABLE.

If you know me, as many of you do, you may have heard my "professional" angry voice. It's the once that is only slightly lower in pitch than my normal speaking voice, but whatever southern accent I usually have, is gone. My words are sharply punctuated and clearly enunciated. I don't swear and I don't raise my voice. I've never met anyone who mistakes that tone of voice for anything but serious and uncompromising.

Well, a superviser at Time Warner got an earful of that. I told her the whole story. I laid waste to every ridiculous implied counter-argument she made. I explained that in order for me to work with them at this point, I would lose even more money (because it would cost me time off from work) to stay home and wait for them. And by the end of it, she was verbally running for cover.

One of my final remarks to her was that unless this came to a speedy resolution, this would represent the end of our business relationship.

Verizon offers cable and internet services. I'm sure their pricing is competetive.

So, tomorrow, I will be on the phone again with Time Warner explaining why December 13th is unacceptable. 26 apartments of 36 are without service. They need to fix this right away.