Bloggin' With Bitchass

Leave It To Jemmie...

...to miss her own birthday party. I'm not real happy about missing it, but it looks like everybody had fun at least, if you go by the Tease Time Report that ran in the Occasional Assassin today.

I would've loved to have been there, but I spent the last two nights trying to work on the phone with Comcast Tech Support to have them diagnose the problem that was keeping me from getting to the Internet. You know, it's like rolling the dice whenever you have to call these people. Sometimes you get a good tech, sometimes you get a lazy bastard who clearly doesn't want to be bothered to do anything beyond reading from their script. This is why I try to avoid having to talk to these people like I would try to avoid the plague.

I had already decided from doing my own troubleshooting that the problem was with the modem that I lease from Comcast. But I had to call Tech Support for two reasons. One was to find out if there was an outage in my area that might explain something, and the second is that I have to have a Tech authorize a modem exchange.

On Wednesday night, I talked to a script reader who had no interest at all in doing any troubleshooting, and I would have pressed her on it until she told me that there was in fact an outage in my area, and that it would be fixed by the next morning. I was a fool . I believed her.

The next morning before I left for work, I checked the connection but it was still out. I checked it again after getting home from work yesterday, and you guessed it, still no Internet. Back I go to the phone to call Tech Non-Support again. But first, I bypassed my router by hooking up directly from my network card to the modem and tried a few things... still nothing. If I hadn't done that, the tech would've claimed that the problem was with my router. So I called, hoping that the tech will magically reset everything, and I'll still be able to get online in time for Tease Time. Wishful thinking, I know. Stupid me.

This time the tech said there was no local outage, like I hadn't figured this out by now, but at least he was more willing to do something. I figured if nothing else we'll diagnose a bad modem and he'll authorize an exchange for me, even if it means I'll be offline for another night. But he made things interesting. He told me that since he could see my modem, the problem was obviously with my equipment. Now, I'm no expert on this but I had already had my computer talking to my router and my router was talking back, so I figured that I was prolly OK up to the router at least.

When I pointed that out to him, and told him that I could not see his gateway, he told me to wait a few minutes, and after having me release and renew the IP address and reboot a few times, he said he was thinking now that it was the modem. He wrote up an authorization for me to exchange the modem. Lovely.

Like I said, I'm no expert at this, and I have a nagging thought in the back of my head that maybe I missed something. Maybe I'll get the new modem and find out that I still can't get online. Or not.

If the modem fixes the problem, I'm gonna figure that if the first tech had been willing to check a little, I could've gotten the new modem after work on Thursday, and still had enough time to get things running. If this happens, then I'm blaming Comcast for making me miss my own damn birthday party.

If I find out that the problem lies elsewhere, I'll fess up and tell everybody what the actual problem turns out to be, whether it makes me look stupid or not. I'ts not like I haven't heard that before anyway.

See you all next time!

Princess, thanks for the Bitchin' Birthday Party, I just wish I coulda made it to it. Hopefully we'll be doing a call this weekend.

As always, Your bitchass wuvs You!

little bitchass