Farrter's Day

Fathers day was very low key this year. It started with my grade school aged daughter giving me a handmade card. She's been into frogs lately and the card has a cute green frog drawn with big blue eyes saying "Rrrrappy Farrter's Dayrr!". Now, I know I'm supposed to say it as "Happy Father's Day" sounding like a frog, but somehow I find the unintended meaning to be so much more irreverently amusing. Aw, this is a keeper!

The Doggy Days of Summer

It is summer and the dog is confronting her arch nemesis regularly in the morning; the back yard lawn sprinkler. The sprinkler is the kind that has the jet of water that pulses to move it in an arc. The dog goes after the jet of water at the source. She gets absolutely drenched. Cheap entertainment for her, as well as us - if we keep our distance.

Support Escalation Hell

Our DSL line went belly up. It drops on rare occasion, but generally comes back shortly. So I waited. I tested to make sure everything at my end was working OK.

The next day I called Earthlink support. There I ran into the most extensive teleprompter I've ever had to navigate through. Seriously, it took on the order of 20 selections to get to their support person. Plus listening to all their messages. Then that person, with a strong India accent, started running me through their troubleshooting process. Step by step by step... With a fair amount of repeating so I could understand what she said. During the process I had to disconnect my home network, disable all firewall and virus software, and reconfigure a good number of system settings. In the end, I was escalated to a "senior technician".

That meant calling another number with my handy dandy ticket number. No teleprompter this time, but I got another person with a strong India accent. Then we did more testing. More questions. Once again I got escalated. My ticket was submitted and this time they would call me...

I didn't have to wait too long before I got a call from someone who actually sounded like English was their primary language. They ran through some of the same checks and let me know that everything on my side was checking out OK (like I said...). Little consolation to me that all the recabling and reconfiguring had only proven that it was unnecessary. So ... three hours into it, I was once again escalated. This time to SBC, who takes care of the actual phone lines and hardware. No phone call this time, unless things weren't working after 24 hours.

Apparently someone kicked the right machine, because the next day my DSL was working again.

Would you consider this good support?