Still online...

Well, I'm glad I can still do dial-up. I've tried everything I know how to do with the cable modem and I've concluded it's one of two things:

1. My LAN port is fried and I'll need to get a PCMCIA card installed to make a new LAN connection. (Or there's some other kind of connectivity/stuff not talking to other stuff issue). I figure I can fix this by first getting a computer dude to check out the LAN port to see if it's fried or not, and then checking all the settings.

or

2. There's something screwy with the cable modem or the cable connectivity. I talked to a friend last night (she also happens to be the DA in this town...which might be useful someday) and her cable internet's been out. But she's not as incensed by it as I am, but then she said she and her husband had just been too busy to muck with it. I also talked to my brother - who is in a totally different part of the country with a different cable company but he said that when they got the Internet service, they (meaning his wife; my brother is even less good at being forceful and firm than I am) had to raise holy Hell with the cable company to get it to operate...like me, the cable company kept putting them off, claiming either something was broken on their computer or they "weren't doing it right." (My brother is a whiz - in a minor sort of a way - with computers so that was highly unlikely).

If that's the case, I will raise holy Hell until it's fixed. And I have three weeks before the fall semester starts in which I will have sufficient free time to become a real nuisance to the customer-service desk at my cable internet company if necessary. I will request refund of my cable internet fees, I will tell them to change me out to DSL, I will ask them to cancel my contract...if it takes threatening to call the BBB on them, I will. (This is, in case you want to know, one of the divisions of James Cable, LLC.)


Of course it could just be a trashed LAN connection that 10 minutes of geekery from a guy who knows what he's doing will fix. I hope that's it.


It frustrates me when there's bad customer service. Part of it being, for a lot of these type of things, it involves a person taking a day off work, or scheduling time to be home. Far too many service-people seem to assume that everyone else has a totally flexible schedule where it's no hardship for them to sit at home for many hours or even multiple days.

I find myself thinking that if I were looking for a new career, I'd become an electrician or plumber or computer tech or something like that. If I worked alone, I'd hire an answering service (or carry a cell phone that was always on) so people could actually talk to a real person instead of leaving a phone message that may or may not be returned. And I'd try to be realistic in scheduling - not taking on so much work and not underestimating how quickly I can do things.


Right now I'm lying on my living room floor using dial-up after trying for about 1/2 hour to get the cable internet working again. I'm nothing if not stubborn.

****

That said - I'm pretty happy with the digital cable. It seems that a lot of the "good" channels are on the digital tier and are not offered on basic cable where I live.

I stayed up too late last night watching "A Member of the Wedding" on TCM (I know I read the book as a young teenager but the movie seemed to make more sense to me than the book did.) And this morning I watched "Irma la Douce" (ironically... a movie about a prostitute, watched before I headed out to church.) That one was on "Encore Love" (one of the "premium" channels I get free for a short time, I suppose so they can maybe hook me in and make me buy them).

I think I'm probably going to watch more movies than I did in the past...part of the problem is so many of the basic cable channels show movies I don't care for (like AMC - they used to show good stuff until [I assume] Ted Turner bought up all the rights to it. Now they show 70s monster flicks, and a few bad prints of old Westerns, and some rather horrid movies from the 80s that I would hardly call "classic."). I also don't like commercial interruptions...they are too distracting and make me more prone to turn the tv off and go do something else. It's like they break the "spell" of the movie. But on the non-commercial-showing networks, you get the whole movie, without breaks - more like you'd experience in a theater. And the tension's not broken, or the "spell" isn't broken. In a way, it's more like reading a book. (At least until publishers figure out a way to beam advertisements into the middle of books so that after you've read 40 pages or so, an ad for diet pills or fast food or pintle-raisers shows up before your eyes.)

There's a real pleasure - one I had forgotten - of lying in my couch in my dark living room, just watching a movie before bed. (Yes, I know, I have a dvd player. But I also have to admit there's a certain pleasure in the serendipity of finding a movie I've never seen before, or read about and thought sounded interesting, and just sitting down to watch it. I feel the same way about music on the radio - I have over a hundred CDs, and yet, I still miss having a local channel that plays the kind of music I like. And - now I do get some digital music channels, including a couple of classical channels, and some jazz, and one for "standards.")