Charter Problems
February 23, 2007

You can blame today's downtime on Charter. I think that their goal is to provide a day's worth of downtime once a month - where at least twenty subscribers must call Malaysia in order to reset their modems fifty times and get a tech sent out.

Even More Fun With Charter
November 16, 2006

It is now my goal to document every extensive downtime that Charter has wrought upon my poor little soul. Yesterday around 03:00, my box at home got knocked off the net. "Oh noes!", says I, "What have I done to bring this upon myself?". When I get home around 05:00 - I find that indeed, there are no internets coming from my tubes! I've got Charter in my phone contact list now (Yes, it's that bad) - and dialed them right up.

After sitting through a hold queue, I get dumped to an automated "help system" that tells me to power-cycle and all that good stuff ("What is the nature of your problem?", "No cable signal.", "I'm sorry? What? If you're having internet problems, please say; 'Internet Problems'"). I waited on hold for a robot, cool. I mash the zero key repeatedly and it transfers me to a real hold queue. I wait awhile and then get Audrey from Rochester. It takes thirty minutes to run through her script before she finally runs the damned modem diagnosis and - HOLY SHIT, my modem aint on their network. You'd think that it cost them 50$ each time.

After that, she tells me the next available appointment is a week from that day. "Thank you for choosing Charter." - I wish I had a choice.

I hang up with her and call back completely dis-satisfied and perfectly happy to schedule another visit just to annoy them. It's their techs who did something wrong anyways, it always is. I think that they hire out of the High School Football Team(tm). I go through the scripts, play all the right lines... then my cable LED blinks on. What? Here it comes again! This time, it stays on. I'm on the phone with the Op and tell her to cancel my prior request.

I hang up, go downstairs to the equipment room... sure enough there's two bumbling Charter techs. They had techs on site, and were perfectly willing to schedule an appointment for a week from today. Cool. Thanks St. Cloud City Counsel; Monopolies rock!

More Fun With Charter
October 30, 2006

Well, I had to go and ruin it for myself - didn't I? I was mentioning the other day how much we were loving Citescape at work... and it seems to have come back to bite me. Since I'm in a kind of out of the way spot and in an apartment - we can't get Citescape service.

Somewhere around noon yesterday I began getting high packet losses on my Charter account. Then somewhere around 06:00P (when I was sitting down to do my management homework) it hit. 67% packet loss, and no viable routes. So, I sat down and called Charter. I had forgotten the idiocy that is rampant there. I call in, just to report that they're having network issues and I'm stuck on the phone for half a freaking hour. "Well, is the cable plugged in? Did you reset the modem? Oh, you can't have the modem plugged into a router for this - I need you to plug it into a computer. What's the MAC address?" all myriad of things that were completely unnecessary.

Here's how it should have played out. "(introductory niceties) May I have your account number? (have software check network weather in area denoted by account (you are keeping an eye on this - right?)) Oh my, there is high packet loss on that whole network segment.". Done. Simple, eh?

Silly monopolies.