One of Those Weeks
Tuesday morning, while I was splitting sick child duty with Kat, my Earthlink DSL service inexplicably died. After the usual 45 minutes of plowing through the tech support scripts (”Yes, I rebooted the computer and the modem, and it didn’t help.” “All right, sir, I’m going to ask you to do that again.” “Grrrrr…”) and getting a trouble ticket, I called my AEA cohorts and a couple of clients to let them know I was taking the day off.
The next morning, still without net access, I called back Earthlink. What was the status? No update. Had anything been done? No. When would they do something? Friday. Did they really feel that was an acceptable response to the problem, after doing nothing for 24 hours? Evasion galore. Thanks, guys. That’s ever so helpful. Of course, there’s not much I can do about it—if this was a problem I could fix, I’d obviously have done so.
I’m actually seriously thinking about getting a cable modem (but no cable TV service); I’d just switch DSL providers, but that means two weeks offline while my phone line is “provisioned” for DSL service, which makes no damn sense at all (it already has DSL service) but everyone assures me is absolutely necessary.
That same day, I found out my office line’s voice mail isn’t working. People can leave me messages just fine, but the system doesn’t think I need to know about them. I swear, I should just kill off the voice mail feature and go back to an answering machine. Decentralization, baby.
So in the interim, I’ve been borrowing a cuppa wifi from various and sundry coffee shops and public libraries. This is hit-or-miss at best: some clouds are locked down to let only a few ports through, and things like secure IMAP aren’t on that list. So no e-mail there. Others are more open, thank Ged. Unfortunately, I found one in particular that had closed up, leading me to the deeply technovertigolocial realization that “the Temple library’s wifi now requires authentication”. Sadly, there was nobody around to tell me the password, and prayer didn’t really help.
To top it off, now I’m getting sick, just in time for AEA Boston. And of course it’s an upper-respiratory thing, turning my throat and upper palate scratchy and raw.
Waaaaah. I know, things could be worse, but the accumulation of annoyances is rather like being nibbled to death by ducks.