TECHNOLOGY TURMOIL

This summer brought a series of technology issues along with the incredible heat. For six weeks sometime between 8:30 and 9:30 each morning my internet would go down. It would come back up on its own between 12:30 and 1:30. My peak usage time is morning. When it was down it also effected the TV. Calling or texting the carrier put you in touch with a not too bright AI and you had to beg to talk to a real blood-in-their-veins human being. When I finally got a person who seemed to understand me, they gave me a twenty-dollar credit and recommended I take my gateway into their store and have it replaced with the newest model. All at no cost to me…except for my time to trek down to the store and impatiently wait my turn to be helped.

I picked the new gateway up the Friday before the Fourth of July and installed it. Instructions were: unplug the old one, plug the new one in. Presto. Only now I had no internet at all. Then the holiday. Then scheduling a technician visit when we were first on the list. Wednesday after the Fourth we had the 8 – 10 AM appointment. Remarkably, the young man was here at 7:45. He walked in with his phone in hand, confirmed what I had named my gateway, tapped something into his phone, hit the reset button on the gateway and it came up. The experts in the store had not configured it appropriately. Hooray!

My jubilation was short lived because the internet took its regular morning break thirty minutes after he left. The AI could find no outages in our area. The following Monday, a truck from the carrier was in our cul-de-sac. Since the internet had just gone down, I walked out in the eighty-eight degree temperature to talk to the guy. I startled him when I rapped on the truck window. He was sitting there all sealed in with the AC blowing full tilt looking at a monitor. I told him what had been happening daily. He said there’d been a lightning strike two weeks earlier one street over that had been repaired but he was still getting noise in the line. He said they were tracking it now and hoped to fix it that day. My husband was skeptical that the lightning was the culprit since my problem predated it by weeks.  He was apparently correct because nothing changed. Not that day or several days later.

I made another technician appointment. The kid who fixed the gateway came fifteen minutes after the daily down time started. He didn’t come to the door. He went straight to the box. My husband believed the problem was actually up at our neighbor’s box. Some of you will recall three years ago we had six months of internet malarkey when a competitor cut through our lines at the neighbor’s junction box. We ran internet on a temporary line running along the gutter waiting all that time for the carrier to bury it. My husband went outside and told the technician about it. The technician took pictures of inside our box, took pictures in the neighbor’s box, and said he couldn’t fix it but would get the right person here to do it today. Where had we heard that before?

However, this kid was the right person to make it all happen. Within less than an hour after he left, we had another technician at our door asking if everything was up. IT WAS! He replaced a repeater in the neighbor’s box. My husband was right about where the problem was. We are the only people on the line past their house so no one else had been complaining. AI to the contrary, there had been a problem in our area.

And there was much rejoicing! Until a week later when my long-time, heavily-used printer/copier/fax lost its mind and could no longer print at all. Any new printers require Windows 10 or 11, not my lowly, but still working and not upgradable Windows 7 PC. But that is a story for another day. I don’t want to give you the headache I’ve been nursing all summer.

May you never have to deal with the AI that insists there is no problem in your area. They aren’t smart enough to have a battle of wits with!! Enjoy!