All I can say is that I must have done something to offend the technology gods. As I type this on my PDA, my broadband service is out and my hosted Exchange service from 4SmartPhone has been unavailable for one full day. I first noticed that last night when I tried to sync two new appointments from my PDA and got the oh-so-cryptic ActiveSync “Support code: 0×85010014″. So since it was raining, I decided to pop in the first of my Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 6 DVDs and discovered that my DVD player is dying.
WOW, my broadband ISP, can’t get anyone here until next Tuesday, but when I told them my neighbor, who has home phone and Internet service through them, is also down and has no usable phone, they said if she calls, they can get someone out today. I just got a call from her and someone should be to her house within the hour. It’s interesting that a tech is available on short notice when phone service is involved, but they can’t come out for three days for plain old Internet service, even though it comes in on the same cable, through the same modem, and is handled by the same techs. This has been a recurring problem for over a year. They come out, “fix” something, it works for a month or so, then goes out again. The last major outage lasted about four days and got us a ten dollar service credit each month for a year. The next outage will result in switching providers to Time Warner RoadRunner… which may not be any better, but at least it’ll be different.
Okay, thumbs are tired now.
Update: Service was restored at about 21:00 EDT Saturday night after being out for approximately six to seven hours. We got a call from WOW this morning asking if everything was okay. They explained that there was an outage in the area and that it had been fixed. Thanks, WOW, for the follow-up call, but you’ve got to do something to fix this for good. These monthly outages are just unacceptable.