They took the inter out of my internet

9 June 2006

As previously noted, I am transferring my DSL service from Speakeasy ($70/month) to Verizon ($15/month). What I didn’t expect, when I made that fateful call to cancel my Speakeasy service, is there are a few (three? five? O Lord, when will it end?) days of lag between Speakeasy cutting me off and Verizon even starting to hook me up to its own systems.

After about two hours on the phone with Verizon’s tech-support department, its provisioning department, its sales department, and its those-­that-­tremble-­as-­if-­they-­were-­mad department, we have finally heard from someone who sounds technically clueful, and she has convinced us that “it takes three to five days” is not phone-company shorthand for “three to five days after the order shows up in our in-box, some technician finds the time to come down to the central office and disconnect two cables”. So I can’t get too mad at Verizon for the delay.

But in the meantime, our house is off the Net. My wife and I can’t surf the Web from home; we can’t email from home. More importantly, we can’t manage our online bill payment from home, we can’t work on selling our car through Craigslist from home, and I can’t log in to work from home. How did people ever live this way?

• Later: Well, that explains a lot
• Earlier: We're baaaack...