March 22, 2004
Earthstinks
No, I'm not talking about our planet, dear. I'm referring to my awful ISP, Earthlink. I spent (read: wasted) my whole Sunday, my only day off, trying to fix my lousy DSL connection. For three years, I have suffered through a 384 Kbps connection speed with their excuses piling up from "it's a best ditch effort" (whatever that means) to a remarkably unbelievable "it's always on, isn't it?" So, though they never guarantee a certain connection speed, they offer rates as high as 1.5 Mbps. I've never been able to get higher than 350 Kbps, and I only live 5,000 feet from the nearest switching office, about a third of the limit for DSL. I've complained and complained, and no one seems to give a shit. And because I don't have cable TV, cable broadband is not possible right now, although I've heard plenty of horror stories about that, too.
So, finally, tired of wasting all of this money on a line that doesn't work as advertised, I wasted a Sunday trying to get it fixed. I sat on hold for large parts of hours. I talked with irresponsible tech support people who didn't know what the fuck they were doing on their end and who had to be coaxed into giving me direction by noneother than moi-même. I rebooted, power-cycled the modem, disconnected this, reconnected that, and at the end of the mess, Covad finally stepped up to the plate and admitted that there was a fault in the line on our end of the connection, and that they would have to come out to the site to fix it, which is what they're doing this afternoon. So, while I'm here at my fifth-to-the-last day at this place, Roommate is working from home to wait for the repairman to come by and fix the line. I can only pray, at this time, that they'll get it fixed for good, 'cause this bitch is tired (read: motherfuckingpissedoff) at having to deal with this any longer.
So, that's all. How are you?
