Stupid ISP

For the last ten days, my ISP has been acting up. Or maybe more correctly stated, acting down. And up. And down, and up. And down, and up. It is like watching dogs in heat.

It will work fine for a while. Then the connection drops. Comes back for a few minutes, drops again. Comes back again, and so on and so on and so on.

As you can imagine this is quite frustrating. Especially the unpredictability of it all. It seems to work fine after midnight. But at any other moment of the day, it drops, drops, drops.

Just call them you would say. Yes, indeed I would like to. But! Enter my hubby, the computer genius. Who isn't happy with just any firewall. But has built a very complicated firewall, running on a dedicated linux computer. Which makes it a lot harder for me to technically trouble-shoot our connection and to bitch about it to our ISP.

So I do what any wife would do, I bitch to him about it. Which he basically ignores for a whole week, each day claiming he forgot to call. On Monday, he couldn't call, because he had to drop off Cees at McDonalds in the morning. Adding a phone call to such a busy day was too much.

Yesterday, he would have called during the day, but he didn't have the phone number... At night, he finally got tired of my whining and decided to call them. After about an hour on the phone, they told him that he had to contact the phone company first, because there was static on the line. Our ISP is Verizon and our phone company is Verizon... I guess we had to call the same person back on a different phone number.

So he spends an hour on the next phone number. On which the automated system keeps confirming how sorry it feels for him, to have all those problems. Would he like to talk about it some more? Their automated system seems more therapeutic than helpful. He finally finds himself an actual human, who tells us that they will send someone over, if we can give them a four hours window we will be home. And no, the 16yo isn't enough, it has to be a grownup. I told hubby that Cees could fake to be a grownup, but he wasn't convinced.

I look at my calendar, which is filled to the brim with doctors, dentists, and other fun facts of life. Rearrange a bunch of things in my mind and tell him that I can be home today from 2pm to 6pm. Which seems to work for the phone people. They even called this morning at 8am to confirm that they will show up.

It is 9:25pm now. Do you think they ever did show up? Do you think they ever let us know that they won't show up? If you answered no to both of those questions, you just won the jackpot!

Looks like I'll have to find another four hours window soon to try to get them to fix this. And then go back to the ISP part of verizon and complain to them again. Unless fixing the phone will fix the DSL part without us having to do that. Which is mostly a dream, seems unlikely that it will become reality.