Misc. Ramblings

I had hoped that I could report that Verizon had increased the download speed of my ADSL service from 768 to 1.5mb/sec, as they had said they would in five days. But I can't. I called Verizon on Saturday, seven days after making the original request and Tech. Support (sounded like someone from India) said it was scheduled for today. Oh well, I guess it's okay to tell customers that a service will start in five days when you actually mean nine (if then).

I'll check on the speed when I get home this afternoon and let you know tomorrow.

Speaking of Inferior Support. For at least five years, I've had pager service through a local company that provide superior service. Pages reached me within 10 to 15 seconds of being sent. Sometimes, just to test the service, I would send myself a page and almost as soon as I hung up the phone the page would come in.

But, came the day when the local company was bought up by a national one. And little by little, the local company no longer was. First, they closed all of the local retail stores, laying off all of the workers, so you could no longer buy the pagers locally. Then they closed all of the service centers, laying of all of the workers, so that if you needed service on your pager you had to mail it to the mainland.

Now, the once responsive local company is nothing but a data center in a warehouse in a seedy part of town.

So when I needed a replacement for my pager, I had to talk to someone on the mainland. They sent me a cheap Chinese made replacement for my original Motorola. But only, it didn't work. Of course, this being a Friday afternoon local time, their technical support had long since closed for the weekend.

So I called them this morning and their first line technical support could not find anything wrong. So it is being escalated to their second tier. If only they had a local office I could just walk in, show them the problem, and get another. But no, I can't do that.

Except, I've decided if they can't fix things on their end, and I have to mail the pager back to them, I will terminate service with them and find a local company that has their own retail stores and technical support here. If I can't find such a company, I will simply not use a pager anymore and switch to my cell phone.

Aloha!