Daley Ponderings

For some reason, Verizon thought it would be a good idea to reconfigure their network early morning Christmas Eve (or late the night before, I am not sure which).  Unfortunately, they transferred me to a broken gateway, which has 3 minutes outages every fifteen minutes or so.

However, the outages aren't quite outages, but just ping times of two seconds.  And since Verizon is closed on Christmas Eve and Christmas, I couldn't get to anyone until today.  But, after 88 minutes on the phone with tech support, the 3rd level tech agreed that the gateway (or its network card) is broken and put in a ticket to replace it.

I wish there was some way for Verizon to put a notice in the customer support form to not waste time with me, that I know about rebooting the modem, length of phone lines, interference with ethernet cords, electromagnetic devices near the momde (that was a new one - hadn't heard that excuse before), and also realize what a gateway is (The first and maybe even the second level support weren't aware that 10.6.3.1 does indeed point to a verizon computer -- hard to diagnose a problem when you don't believe a computer exists).

But, I got to be on the other end of a remote support call, which I hadn't done before.  It is weirder than I expected.  I don't have any idea if the guy knows what he is doing, and how likely he is to go to a random web page and download some virus if I wasn't watching.  And once he manually changed the DNS servers and pronounced the problem with the gateway fixed, I knew I was in trouble.

But, after he saw the outage happen himself 5 or 6 times, he was finally convinced (though he did try to get me to reroute the ethernet wire, until I reminded him that I was on wireless...)  He then told me about the server issue and that they were going to work on it, and it will hopefully be fixed by tonight.  I think they must like to have the customer do something to make them feel as if something might have changed.

But, that's what I get for going with Verizon - and I did a pretty good job of remembering that I knowingly agreed to the cheap verizon prices including their poor customer support.  And since my favorite technician has been over a couple times, the connection has been fine on my end, so now I just need to deal with remote issues, which don't happen very often.  I guess this issue was frustrating since it wasn't a complete outage, other customers maybe aren't noticing it as much, and just figure the "internet is slow", so I am the only one calling in about it.