Back on line

Did anyone miss me? Did you even know I was gone?


Last Monday evening the Munchkins went home. I immediately crawled into bed. When I drug myself out the next morning and booted my computer... I had no internet. That's depressing because I really just wanted to do nothing that day and kind of "bond" with my computer again.


At lunch the spouse declared it dead, not the computer (either one of them), but our internet connection.


When he got home from work Tuesday night, still no internet. sigh

We also found out at this point we had no cable... well, that's not accurate... the had the absolute lowest channels (nothing over Ch13 I think), they were fuzzy and just not good quality.


He called Road Runner tech support. He played their little game of "unplug this, I'll check that, now plug it back in and it should work." Well, it didn't. We were initally give the date of May 27 (that was TWO full weeks) before someone could come out and look at it. Now, if that's the best repair date they've got, so be it. BUT they were NOT willing to adjust our bill for the two weeks.


Then the spouse got on the phone with cable tech support (same company, two phone calls). They gave him a repair date of... wait for it... May 27th. And no adjustment on our bill. Oh no, that isn't acceptable. A superviser gave us a date of May 19th (just under one week), and no, they still weren't going to adjust out bill. But she was going to call back in 15 minutes and let us know if she could get someone out the next day. She didn't call back and no, they didn't come out Wednesday.


However, as I left the house Wednesday morning, there was a Time-Warner Cable truck about half way down our street. That afternoon when I got back and the spouse was home for lunch, he noticed that on his computer, HE had internet access... but alas my little laptop down the hall still didn't. We also turned on the tv and had nice, clear HD cable back, all ba-zillion channels that we paid for, however, in the upper channels the sound would come on for about a minute and then go off. We could switch to another channel and then got back to that channel, but the sound would go back off. This is really annoying when trying to watch a program.


The spouse got back with Road Runner and let them know that we did have internet back. They were simply amazed. They had no reasoning for it and really didn't think the guy in the truck down the street from us could have done anything to our internet service, even though we get cable and internet from the same lines and same people.


He got back with Time-Warner and they told him they would send someone out Friday.


The spouse spent Wednesday night and ultimately Thursday night "fixing" the network problem between our computers. It turned out that our network router had gone bad. New router, now I can connect to the internet again.


Oh, and we kept the appointment for the service call to Time-Warner, the repairman came out today (Friday) in a Road Runner truck they're actually all the same, but you have to call different phone numbers depending on whether you have a Road Runner problem or a T-W cable problem, but you may get a guy in a cable truck to fix your Road Runner problem, or you may get a guy in Road Runner truck to fix your cable problem, but don't get those freakin' phone numbers mixed up or they can't help you. The Road Runner/T-W repair guy changed out the HD cable box. It was one of their older boxes, even though we haven't had HD service that long and said those boxes were never any good to begin with.



I'm back on-line and all is right with the world.