Technology can be fickle

So today’s blog post was originally going to be a Brad’s Tips and Tricks for how I do data indexing and retrieval. However connectivity has put a change to that. What is kind of interesting is that my fear has come to be realized. Today (well Thursday, March 19, 2009) we changed from having an analog phone line to going to a single provider (Comcast) for phone, internet, and digital cable. It was also the day I decided to turn off the fax number, literally for the first time in over a decade I do not have a home fax number.

We decided to make the changes for the following reasons:

• Save money
• Get more movie channels
• We have not gotten an inbound fax in a year
• We thought about it and have not had a cable outage since we moved

So does anyone want to guess what happened this evening about midnight? I could not connect to the internet. I did some troubleshooting and could not ping anything outside of my local home network. Maybe stuff needs to be rebooted after all the configuration changes today. I rebooted the wireless router. No change. I rebooted the modem. No change. I go to get the phone to call for tech support. No dial tone. I then noticed that the TV had no signal.

No big deal I figured it was probably a configuration mistake. We had changed service so maybe someone forgot to check a box. So I got out my cell phone and called and went through the phone tree. The first thing the phone system tried to do was figure out my account by the phone number I had called from. It was different, so then I had to enter the number manually, not really hard but first inconvenience. I got that entered in, and the “helpful” automation indicated that I had an appointment scheduled for March 18, 2009 between 4PM and 7PM. It then asked if I wanted to cancel, confirm if the technician was on the way, or reschedule. I thought wow, how cool is it that they can move time backward and undo stuff like that over the phone. I pressed the button to indicate that was not the issue.

The system then asked me what I was calling about from a few options. I selected the outage option. The system then indicated that the outage had been reported and that the schedule restoration would be at 1:09AM March 19, 2009. It then asked if I wanted to get a call when the system was restored. I indicated yes. It then said it would call back between 8AM and 9PM. It did not indicate which number it would call. So I am waiting to see which one it does call.

There were two things that made me think that this was a comical situation:

• If the system knew there was an outage, why didn’t it tell me that it was reported and they were working on it as soon as I entered my phone number? It seems that would be the most likely reason I was calling – not to reschedule an appointment in the past.
• It seems that like clockwork there is always a problem the day after we get an installation. The last outage was when there was a scheduling error when we moved into the house. They came out and hooked it up on the move in day. They then came  out and disconnected it at the pedestal the next day. I called and they dispatched someone the next day.

So what have I learned?

• My fear of putting all our communication with one provider came true less than eight hours after the change over when we lost all of it
• I have great timing for getting an outage to occur
• Time is relative, when they say something is going to be fixed at 1:09 don’t believe it. It is currently 1:22AM and the system still says 1:09.