Technical Odyssey: A Short Stay in Cyber-Hell — Part 1

 

 

My original FB post was going to be;

 

“Blood sacrifices have been made to ancient gods. Venus, the moon goddess, has been worshipped in midnight rituals. Payments have been made – Mammon and Moloch have been appeased. Waiting periods have expired. Cable TV, internet, and phone services have been restored. Hardware repairs have been successful. I am now back online and re-connected to the consumerist mainline. Hooray?!

 

How patently unfair of those greedy corporate overlords to expect that I pay for the services they supply! Don’t they realise that without these services I can’t be as easily manipulated into wasting my life energy playing their fixed game? You’d think that with the obscene profits made from the sales generated by these media that we could be supplied with free access to the corporate world’s favourite new advertising methods.”

 

…but it quickly became apparent that I had greater issues to deal with.

 

It began as speed and connection related problems with my ISP/Cable provider. I was advised to upgrade my digital TV tuners, Router-modem, and data speed package (for a temporarily reduced rate, of course). Within three days it had morphed into the complete loss of ALL of my communications media, including my shiny new(ish) smartphone. No phone, No TV, No Internet. L

 

A Breakdown of Events (pun intended)

Day 1 – No Internet Access (DNS went AWOL so, no WWW – Direct IP still possible sometimes)

                Digital Cable TV coming and going

                Email works (SMTP only)

Day 2 – No Internet at all (even local Direct IP not working)

                No Digital Cable TV

                Email works sporadically (SMTP local only)

Day 3 – New equipment arrived & installed

                In the middle of the activation phone call my cellphone service stopped

                No phone, No TV, No Internet

 

I tried using someone else’s phone to call my ISP the next day, but ended up on perpetual hold. I gave up after 3.5 hours. The next day I used my neighbours phone to call the cellphone company. Apparently I hadn’t made a payment in nearly 3 months according to their records. I definitely DID make the payments from my bank account via the internet, like I always do. After a trip to the bank I found that several of my bill payments over the past 2 months had been mysteriously aborted by the electronic payment system. I had a rather hefty bank balance though. So, fine – I tried to make the payments from the bank through the teller. The ‘system’ rejected every attempt to pay a bill. It kept insisting there was a zero balance in my account, while the account balance showing was quite high. After working with the manager for a while she decided that she would do the payments manually via old-fashioned paper source transfers. She figured it would take 48hrs to go through their clearance centre, and another 48hrs to land in the payee’s accounts. Ok, I went home to wait patiently for 4 days.

 

The hardest part to deal with was convincing my daughter that the TV and Internet would eventually come back. Due to her memory problems, she was re-experiencing the loss multiple times daily. Thankfully I have amassed a large library of digital versions of kid’s shows, cartoons, and movies - so I was able to keep her entertained well enough through this small ‘First World’ crisis. At least my computer and her laptop still worked… for now.

 

Day 8 – I turned on my cellphone and found that I had service… sort of.

                BlackBerry Messenger was about the only thing that would work properly.

                Web Browser just sat there trying to load pages with no timeout – killed the battery.

                Facebook seemed to work, but it was just a foul trick! I could see posts under Social Feeds.

Clicking on FB posts did sweet FA. At least I could partially read the posts people were making.

No actual phone service – couldn’t make any calls (returned Network Error every time).

 

I had to give up in the middle of my efforts on several occasions because I just didn’t have enough time to deal with it all. Trying to phone your phone service provider when you have no phone service presents certain difficulties. “You could always visit our website, or send us an email.” Was the inane suggestion from one of the helpdesk(sic) warm bodied, script reading, trained monkeys I actually did eventually get to speak with.