July 23, 2008

We are now experiencing technical difficulties

As we all know, sometimes when it rains it pours. Right when I was gearing up to start posting regularly again, our home internet and phone connections decided to crash and burn. It's now been intermittent or down essentially since I posted last. Unfortunately we have Charter as a provider, and they're AWFUL about customer service, so it could be a bit before we have the issue resolved. I'm writing this note from work, but I can't really compose a full post during the work day, so I'm now at the whim of the cable company. Scary thought, isn't it? At any rate, I'll definitely post (one way or another) before we go on vacation next Wednesday, so please check back soon.

Thanks for your patience!

5 comments:

Joy said...

Sorry to hear that. We just switched to AT&T DSL from Charter Cable Modem. We were having intermittent problems. Since it takes 4 business days for anyone to show up, it would fix itself before they ever got there. And go out again 2 days later. And then there was the whole mess of who pays for what and how. Really scary and messy. I don't know that AT&T is going to be any better, but at least it got us out of the ickiness with Charter.

Good luck!

Chile said...

Good luck! When we first went DSL from dial-up, we stuck with the provider we'd had. Huge mistake. In that one month, we have an accumulated total of 2 hours of service. When we finally, after over 8 hours of phone calls to customer service (in India) figured out the problem, they wanted to downgrade the service and increase the price. I told them what they could do with this solution and jumped on board with another provider.

We continued to have intermittent problems and I had to hound them to send service techs out to fix phone lines and connections. It's finally fixed though and I don't lose my connection every time it rains.

So, really, good luck. And don't hesitate to find a better choice if they will not provide customer service. I'm embarrassed at how long it took me to give one the boot.

Lori said...

Joy - We switched from AT&T to Charter because of major customer service issues with AT&T (as in having our service completely shut down and my husband's email account deleted "on accident". Twice). We've had intermittent problems with our modem, which we rent from Charter, but this is the first time it's also effected our phone and cable. We did manage to get a technician out (on the second try) about ten days ago now, and he identified the problem as a loose wire on the pole behind our house. Apparently when he moved the wire around, the signal would drift in and out. Sadly, Charter has simply not followed up and sent a lineworker to fix it. Every time we think we have it all set up in their system, they fail to show and leave a message on our home phone (now, keep in mind that the main issue is that our phones aren't working) that we should call to "reschedule." Argh. We're now considering switching to AT&T's U-verse, but we've heard mixed reviews of that too. I wish there were more options here in St. Louis... So thanks for the positive thoughts - we'll likely need that luck!

Lori said...

Chile,
As I told Joy above, we've had trouble with the only other competitor in town, so we're still debating about what to do. At least our experiences with Charter has taught us that there's actually a code that the billing department can use that's used exclusively for "customer lied to by agent." It comes with a credit of $25, if you were wondering. Apparently the lesson here is to never trust a company that expects its agents to lie to the customer...

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