mm412: Choice Two

June 16, 2008

MUDGE’s Musings

As I start to write this post, it’s 8:56pmCDT, pretty late to begin a project on a Monday night.

Mondays. (Or, I guess Sundays. If you observe the Sabbath on a Saturday). (Or, I guess Saturdays. If you observe the Sabbath on a Friday).

Any way you look at it, the first day of the work week is the tough one. The alarm clock, which if one is fortunate, stayed off for the entire weekend, resumes working its mischief on schedule, in Mr. & Mrs. MUDGE‘s distressing case, at 5:10am. That’s a hurtful note, indeed.

So, an advantage of beginning the day with the roosters, is that one has the capacity to end the day reasonably early. And, as is typical, the nine-hour workday, and the two-hour round trip commute still had me home and ready to hit the ‘Sphere at a very reasonable hour.

But there were responsibilities that had prior call on my precious blogging time tonight. Spent the past 2-1/2 hours reconciling bank accounts and paying my various creditors and other mid-month obligations, something I might have done when fresher yesterday, had my good friends at Comcast cooperated and left me with a connection I could depend upon while accessing my on-line banking resources.

By the time service had restored itself just as mysteriously as it had gone away, two lengthy waits in customer service jail plus an hour or two later, the impetus to do the responsible thing had seeped away, restored in full tonight, thankfully.

Now, faced with limited access to blogging resources (suitable computer, software [see the Blogging Process Hall of Fame in the sidebar], and most of all, time) yr (justifiably) humble svt has arrived at two tactics to honor the blogger’s prime directive: Thou Shalt Blog Daily!

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mm411: Comcast rant no. 3,219,586,773,089,246,129,6…

June 15, 2008

MUDGE’s Musings

In the 3-1/2 weeks since our previous Comcast disappointment, our monopoly ISP has been behaving itself. Of course, we were away during most of the past week (if you somehow missed our Boston coverage, here’s the most recent), but it only took less than 36 hours since returning for a really pernicious issue to appear, for the first time in this grizzled veteran’s experience.

It’s an intermittent phenomenon: suddenly the modem loses connection, then slowly reconnects. Stays connected for about 90 seconds; then the cycle repeats.

For hours.

It’s really impossible to conduct any activity at all on the Internet when one’s connection interrupts for a minute, every 90 seconds.

Contacted support. Found the same bipolar experience as previously experienced. The first person I talked to, after about a 15-minute wait (always a good indicator of system wide issues!) had absolutely nothing to offer except scheduling a technician visit. No diagnostics. No word of any system issues. Nothing. Concluded the call in disgust, without scheduling a visit.

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mm389: A further word about process…

May 23, 2008

MUDGE’s Musings

As an addendum placed at the end of the previous post, yr (justifiably) humble svt mentioned that Comcast had prevented timely daily posting because service, at least at MUDGEville, had been interrupted for 32 continuous hours this week.

Shortly after that post had been published, our connection, which had reappeared at 7:00am as randomly as it had disappeared two nights before, again disappeared.

The Comcast customer service protocols between the three calls that have been placed in the past few days were strangely different, but I really don’t have the patience to rehash — we all have our call center horror stories. At least all of these were domestic facilities.

The third call, though, was so refreshingly different, with so little harassing “protocol” compared to the first two, that I wondered whether I had reached the same company. Upon reflection, perhaps I reached a different outsourced call center. What a positive difference! While I hope never have to make another call to Comcast (except to cancel!), my reality ballcap tells me that of course I will! When I do, I can fervently hope that it goes to “Thomas.”

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