Saturday, December 22, 2012

22 December 2012 Try our on-line self-help



          We lost power twice Thursday.  We called about the loss of service via land line.  By the time we called in the power board had already determined the scope of the outage and uploaded a message to let customers know that they were being taken care of. 
          Some time this morning, around 1100, we lost cable internet and cable television.  After determining that the problem is located beyond our walls, I called ComCast.  It is now 1119 and I’ve been on hold for 15 minutes, subjected to bits of bad music and a stream of commercials and sales pitches. 
          When I have no service, it is a bad time to try to sell me anything that requires the service I’m calling to report as unavailable. 
          After 20 minutes of hold time, I was finally connected to a customer support employee who took another 3-4 minutes to tell me “we are experiencing an un-planned outage.  I thanked her for that, announced my displeasure at being directed toward unavailable internet “self-help,” and wished her good luck.  She is, assuredly, assigned to the “under-staffed for the holiday weekend” desk; fielding calls from people who are suddenly saddled with kids who have no internet access and no cable television to entertain them.  Not a job I’d care to have to work. 
          We’ll ask for credit for lost service when the system is back up. 
          The weather today is sunny, breezy, and cold.  The predicted high, before we lost internet feed, was 40°F.  The predicted low for tonight, 18°F
          During the next week, I need to change out the weather station batteries.  I’ll hope for a reasonably warm, dry day, as the screws for the rain gauge are smaller than dried cloves and impossible to see if they are dropped.  If they are not replaced, the electronics for this component are no longer watertight.  Fingers crossed.


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