[Smaug] PacHell DSL...

[Karsten Wade]

On Thu, 6 Jun 2002, John Callaway wrote:

>    Has anyone living in Santa Cruz and getting DSL through Pac Bell 
> (specifically, the CO downtown at Center and Walnut) had problems with their 
> connection in the last 48 hours or so?

Mine's been fine, I get ADSL through that CO direct from SBC-PBI.  I have
had it for a couple of years, and it has been down for a total of 30+
hours, with two outages several weeks back of most of the workday (~6
hours).  Otherwise, it's been fine.

>    Mine's down, Pac Bell's site is unnavigable, and I hate calling them 
> because I have to pretend I'm running W*nd*ws so they don't hang up on me.

What a joke.  Two times ago, I spent an hour on tier one tech support
doing everything he asked, and my Windows Media Player[1] still hasn't
recovered from a driver assault.

It was so ridiculous, and I was just trying to follow the escalation path
with him, I could tell the problem was up the pipe, I was even getting a
connect signal from the other side on this cheapass Westel DSL widget,
just no packets.

While all this is happening, everyone getting SBC-PBI from that CO can get
squat, which I don't know because I didn't think to do what you are
doing, and this poor tech didn't know and who knows when they told him.  I
only found out four hours later when my brother told me.

Anyway, lesson learned, the next time I called I told _them_ that it was
definitely there problem, I had run the same troubleshooting routine that
they had run with me several days previously, and asked them to
double-check that there wasn't another outage.  Hearing that nothing was 
reported, I asked them to dispatch a tech to work from my outside wiring
to the CO since the problem wasn't me. They accepted this.  Amazing.

4 hours later, DSL comes back, no calls or answers.

A week passes, and I call for a status.  They can't find why my ticket was
closed.  She checks and checks and says she will research the answer and
call me back, or have a higher level tech support person call me back.

That was on 15 April.  Still no word.

So, ups and downs, Mercury's in retrograde [2], YMMV.

- k'

[1] Windows Media Player - a device for playing Windows Media Files and
DivX movies while using Linux machine for other purposes, resembles an OS
only in form not function.  AKA "Windows 98".

[2] http://www.astrologycom.com/mercret.html

'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`
 Karsten  Wade           "As sharp as the leading
 karsten@phig.org        edge of a ball bearing."
 http://phig.org/gpg/              - Dallas Dobro