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2013-01-30 11:41 AM A Little Static on the Line? Some stuff..... Filters. Namely DSL/telephone filters. These have been the bane of my world this week. The other day I spent the day as usual, online here and there, off and on, until nighttime when I turned everything off and went to bed. Nothing new there. Nothing out of the ordinary. When I woke up the next day (I believe this was Sunday night/Monday morning), I turned on my computer upstairs and my Internet Access was out. Drat! I waited. This sometimes happens with Veriz0n, the internet will go out for a short period for some reason or other, I know not what, but it will always pop back on again without much of a wait. Not this day. I waited all day. I kept trying my laptop to see if it was working -- nope. Out. So, I decided to move on to Plan B. That drastic plan that nobody EVER wants to visit - calling Veriz0n on the phone and asking them for help. Now we all know that many employees of these companies don't live here in the U.S. but are scattered far and wide, namely in places in India,etc. I know that because when I ask their names, to put into my notes which I take down, they always have Indian-names, and this was no exception. Not that there's anything wrong with Indians - no, I like them, in fact, but the whole outsourcing thing is what gripes my grits, but we won't go there today. After trying to connect with a real person for about 15 minutes at Veriz0n, I got disconnected. By that point I was screaming at the wall, at my room, at my computer, and at the phone. I was losing it. Paul came in and sat by me. I calmed myself down and dialed the telephone number again and went through all the prompts until miraculously I connected with a real voice. I wrote his name down, and it was, indeed, an Indian-sounding name, and he was very nice and polite and very intelligible to me. I did have to ask him to repeat things a few times but not nearly as many times as I usually do. After explaining my problem, he went about trying to do tests from "his end" (heh! Other Side of the World!!) and he could find nothing on their end of things to be wrong! The last resort was to schedule a repairman to come out to the house and sort thru things here for the problem. He told me the cost for this particular remedy, involving the repairman coming to the house, would be $90 for the first 30 minutes and then if it took longer (why wouldn't it????), it would be another $45 for every 30 minutes thereafter. Yikes! At first I thought he'd said $19 for the first 30 minutes but when he said it twice, my voice kind of got louder and I said "WHAT????? DID YOU SAY NINETY DOLLARS FOR THIRTY MINUTES???" "Yes" said he. I looked over at Paul (and remember I had my speaker phone on so he could hear us both over the speaker phone) and said "You, my love, have chosen the wrong occupation!" Anyway...we scheduled the repairman for between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. the following day (Tuesday). Anytime between those hours...not "morning" or "afternoon" but someone had to be here that whole time. AND, he asked if we had any pets and I told him about Frick and Frack here and he said that they MUST be tied up/restrained/put into a room and the door locked before the man would come in. Oh-Kay..... Later that evening, Paul and I were having supper quietly in the eating room off the kitchen when I started ruminating about all the telephones in this house. We have four of them. Well, really five. But four telephone jacks. One upstairs, one in the living room, one in the breakfast/supper room, and one down in the basement. The basement!!!!!!!! That phone line we had installed when we moved in here in 1987. We used to use it but then stopped because the old Princess style phone was really old and wasn't working very well. So no phone had been plugged in there for years and years. Up until recently. We came by another Princess phone from someone or somewhere and plugged it in, thinking it would be good for Paul to have a phone in the basement while he's working down there on his lobster gear. The thing is that he never hears it ring and I have to get it and yell down to him...blah-blah-blah... The Indian telephone man had asked me if ALL the phones had those filters on them and yes, I had gone around and put filters on all the phones back a few years ago. All. Except. The. Phone. In. The. Basement!!! A lightbulb went off over my head in the little cloud, and I went (hobbled - I don't do stairs very well) down the cellar stairs and over to the old Princess phone and unplugged it from the jack. Back (hobbling) up the stairs, over to my laptop, and Miracle-of-Miracles! I had internet connection for the first time all day!!! That was it! It's been working ever since. Mr. India had given me a toll-free number to call if I had any more questions, or if I needed to cancel the appointment, and that was front and center in my mind...cancel that expensive appointment. That phone call took me a total of 38 minutes to accomplish. I did get right to a real live voice and asked them to cancel my appointment with the repairman, and I told him how I'd fixed the problem, all in one breath, but he wasn't letting go of that nice juicy repair service call all that easily. He kept asking me to hold...and he'd come back and ask questions... and hold again... but I couldn't just hang up because I was afraid he wouldn't cancel it. So I waited and finally, at 38 minutes into that call, he let me go. There. Problem solved! The moral of this story is make sure any phone lines you have are equipped with filters. We live in the Dark Ages here and are still working with LAND LINES in our home. I know some of you (the younger ones) may not even know what a Land Line is, but suffice it to say we don't do smart phones or the like here. We have one cellular phone (a Jitterbug flip phone with no fancy stuff on it) between us and Paul uses it now rather than me. We'll probably go to our graves being the dinosaurs that we are in the world of technology but that's just the way it is here. Now, back to your regularly scheduled programming... Cheers, Bex P.S. I can't let this day go by without saying that I heard Ashley Judd and her husband of 11 years, Dario Franchitti, are divorcing soon, and I was very saddened as I always have loved her and he's from Scotland and probably one of the most handsome men I've ever seen, and I always thought they had a storybook marriage, but guess not. The other bit of news is that Ashley Judd is thinking of running for Senate from Kentucky --- against Mitch McConnell, probably the most powerful Republican in the Senate. That should be interesting. And it leaves me wondering if this divorce has something to do with her plans of entering politics... stay tuned I guess.
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