ted stevens dreamt my worst nightmare

Thursday morning my internet connection died. I troubleshooted every angle with my ISP's tech support help line. No dice. We concluded I was receiving no signal from the outside. Luckily, earlier in the week I had scheduled a service appointment for Friday morning to have a new coaxial outlet installed upstairs. At least the problem would be resolved when the installer arrived (I hoped).

Friday morning at 8:30am the installer arrived. First, he said that he could not install a new outlet (that's why I scheduled the appointment in the first place). He could only drill holes in my ceiling and run a coaxial wire down to my modem in the computer room. Regarding the lack of signal entering the house, he determined there was a problem with the large cable utility box outside in my development. While trying to open the cable box he broke the fucking lock. Worse, he lacked the correct tools fix his mistake. He then left, telling me someone would return in a couple hours to drill the lock, restore my internet connection and add my new outlet.

Two hours came and went. Two more passed. I waited home all day calling my ISP hourly for updates. Tech support, the department that schedules installations, operates from Ohio. They have no way of communicating with the local technicians in Orange County. The system merely showed that my work order had not been completed. They referred me to the billing department (who knows what state or country they're located in). They can send one-way text messages to the local dispatchers and their technicians in the field but cannot communicate with tech support. They sent several text messages to the technician to call me with an update. The dude went AWOL. I never heard back from anyone, so around 4pm I called for the fourth time and reached a supervisor. I scheduled a new appointment for Saturday morning - that was the only way to get an actual person to return to my house and fix the problem.

This morning a technician arrived with two helpers. First, they discovered my cable internet line had been disconnected from the exterior cable utility box. Apparently an auditor clipped my connection because "it was unmarked". My connection had been working uninterrupted and unmarked for over three years and they just decided to kill it now.

The technician plugged my line back in, marked it with my name and address, and then I was back up and running. As for installing another coaxial line in the computer room, he recommended buying a wireless adapter for my PC (duh, why hadn't I thought of that in the first place) which I'm now running.

Sorry to bore you with this tale but I had to vent my frustration. Now I'm heading to BevMo to pick up a good bottle of red wine. The moral of the story is: go wireless and do not do business with Cox Communications!