Bear Flag Blog

So we moved house last weekend. The move was within a zip code, so not far, and we still have a reduced stuff set owing to the size of our previous temporary residences. (Although we will now, finally, summon the rest of our stuff from storage. Meaning that the next time we move, we're paying someone else to do it for us.)

I run republic.org out of my house, on a little Dell box. I'd had Speakeasy DSL for years, going back to the founding of republic.org in 1997, and been largely quite happy with them. However, at the place before the new one they could only offer me speed of 768Kbps down, which was unacceptable. So I switched to Comcast high-speed Internet via cable.

It's been great; fast and very reasonably priced. Until, that it, I attempted to move.

The service appointment was set for Saturday 1-5. I unplugged republic.org that morning, moved it to the new house, was ready to go.

No one ever showed up. At 5:30 I called their tech support and fought my way through the gnarled limbs of the phone tree; the upshot was a new appointment on Sunday morning, 8-12.

No one ever showed up. At 12:30 I called tech support and hacked an entirely different, half-hour path through the phone tree until I reached a live person in Fargo ND, who was able only to inform me that the ticket was open and someone should, in fact, have showed up.

Monday was Labor Day.

...

Tuesday at 8:30 I called to discover that they opened at 8:45. At 8:45 I called and discovered that no one was available until Wednesday morning, so I scheduled an appointment for Wednesday, 8-12.

Wednesday morning, a contractor showed up, attached the cable modem, ran some new cable, and pronounced me ready to go. Foolishly, in retrospect, I let him leave. I plugged in my laptop to the cable modem. Nothing. Cable modem was getting no signal.

I called up tech support and got an appointment to have someone come out between 1 and 3.

No one ever showed up.

I called up at 3:10 and spoke with a tech who would look into matters and call me back.

No one called back.

I called up at 4:45 and spoke with someone who, unlike the person I had spoken with earlier, kept me on the line while he called the local Concord area dispatch. Half an hour later (according to the call time on my cell phone), he said that someone would come by before 8 o'clock that evening.

At 7:30 or so, an actual Comcast employee arrived. He examined the situation and discovered that there was a line filter on the line at the pole, and that there was no way the service had been working before. Additionally, many of the connectors dated to the 1980s and at least one of them fell apart in his hand; he took photos with his cell phone to file a report on the "quality" of the job the earlier contractor had done.

He went into the neighbor's yard and climbed the utility pole (while said neighbor and I stood around watching and gabbing to each other), restrung several cables, went back in the house - and the cable modem came up. A minute of router configuration and all my static IPs were back in business, and we had Internet.

So you have the competent guy to thank for your ability to once again read this blog.