My appointment with Comcast is scheduled for a window of 9–11 am (it’s 8:20 am now) and it can’t come soon enough. This is no way to work.

Yesterday, my modem was down from 12:30–8 pm. Then it magically came back to life for about 3 hours. Even so, there were times where it would go offline for a second, just to come right back. At 11 pm, it went off and stayed off. I could tell that it came back overnight for 10 minutes here, 15 minutes there. 6:30 am, it was back up. Down at 7:45 am. Up at 8 am. Now it’s down again(writing in Blogjet so I can upload this later).

If I’m not online to stay by 11 am, then it’s off to Panera Bread for me for the day (free wifi). I am fortunate that I have a job that allows me to work from home, all I need is my Internet connection and a phone line. But when it goes down I am 100% cut off. Grrrrr….

I have to hope that when Comcast comes and checks the signal, they find that it’s bad and I get a good boost out of it, so in the long run I’ll be better off.

8:29 am and it’s up again…better hit “post” now while I can. Crap…in the time it took me to type that sentence it’s off again.till

9:40 am still off, still waiting.

I will say another thing in Comcast’s favor…I’ve called them quite a few times in the last 24 hours. Each and every time I got through to a human very quickly. Tip: when you get the automated voice asking you to state what the problem is, just hit “0” and you’ll go right to the queue to wait for a human…I tried stating the problem once and the response was so inane it wasn’t worth continuing. In each conversation the person on the other end sounded semi-competent and even though I didn’t get the answer I really wanted but didn’t honestly expect…“We fixed the problem, your connection will be back up in 5 minutes and will stay up” I never hung up the phone feeling angry or frustrated. That’s a lot more than I can say for my experiences with Cablevision back in Connecticut.

It’s been a year on Comcast and this is my first major downtime. As annoyed as I am that I’m sitting here reading email on my phone, I can’t say that Comcast has handled the situation poorly. For all I know, the problem is with my modem (which I own…if it’s the modem, I’ll let Comcast replace it on the spot with a rental).

Yah! Just got the call from the driver that he’s on his way.

10 am – I’m at Panera Bread and their free wifi…problem is, the connection sucks and I’m not in the mood to relocate to a Starbucks. The problem at home is on my street. Turns out that a whole bunch of homes are affected, but not enough neighbors called in. The guy said it takes 4 or 5 calls to trigger an “outtage” and they didn’t hit that with this problem. There was another truck already out, as there was another call but it didn’t hit the “this is a problem” threshhold. Unreal. This is just wrong… it took Comcast nearly 24 hours just to find out that it was a problem on the block. Now let’s see how long it takes to actually fix it.

11:50 am – I’m home. It’s over. Everything is back to normal. Sheesh…20+ hours to even figure out there was a problem that took less than an hour to actually fix. Like that big August blackout a few years ago, it reminds me just how fragile “technology” really is. As sophisticated as we are, it still comes down to a guy in a tree manually fiddling with wires. My kids and grandkids are going to look back on what we call “hi-tech” and laugh at us. I’ve also learned that when I need to go find an Internet connection to get work done, Panera Bread isn’t it. You get what you pay for, I guess.

back to work…