A day and a half

I was internetless for a day and a half!

It all started when Rogers offered me a significantly better deal that I was getting from Bell. I accepted it. Then I called Bell to cancel my service. Of course I should have known Bell wouldn’t let me go that easily. They offered me a better deal than Rogers had offered me. So I accepted it and called Rogers to cancel my appointment.

“But wait!” said Rogers. “What if we were to offer you the same deal, but with extra this and that and so on?”

I declined, because we were getting into the law of diminishing returns and I wasn’t prepared to spend all day on the phone just to save a few more pennies.

The bottom line was that I was staying with Bell, my speed was going up and my bill was going down.

Monday I found a new modem between my doors. Tuesday there was a note in my mailbox from a Bell technician saying “Please call to reschedule.” Reschedule? Reschedule what? Installing the new modem, maybe? GC already installed it for me.

Wednesday morning I was writing a blog post about my new job (!!!) but when I went to post it, I discovered I didn’t have Internet access.

I called Bell. One technician said he’d look into it and call me right back. He didn’t. When I called back I was told that the server that handles all the DSL customers had been down for three days and there was no estimate for when it would be back up. I said that was crazy and they made sympathetic but helpless customer service noises.

That evening they called back and said they’d like to schedule a tech visit for Thursday afternoon.

Thursday the tech arrived and said “Your Internet should be back up.” And it was. I asked what the problem was. He said they’d switched off my old access before they’d switched on my new access, leaving me without any access at all.

Meanwhile, I had had limited access when GC was over, by piggy-backing onto his iPhone’s 3G internet connection. It was painfully slow, but much better than nothing. That’s how I managed to get my blog post posted. (Thank you all for the nice comments, by the way – I was able to read them in my iPhone’s email.)

I got lots of other stuff done while the Internet was down. Boring stuff, mostly, like housework and organizing my recipes, but it was very satisfying. I cleaned some things that had never been cleaned before, at least not in the five years I’ve lived here. For instance, there’s a ledge in my shower where the tile ends and the rest of the wall begins. It’s only about half an inch wide, and it’s above my eye level so I never really noticed it before. But while the Internet was down, I found that sucker and cleaned it.