Rant: Road Runner.

[Platypus]

I am so pissed off. First of all I am out of service for over 5 hours.
Then when I call, they say its not their problem, its on my end. Ok, I run diagnositcs in dos.. all tip top..
My LAN works, so its not the router or the cables or the NICs...
I call back, they say "oh its our fault, be patient"... I wait and hour..
Call back, they say its all fixed, yet I have no net. They have me disconnect my router for like the 3rd time, for no other reason than they dont support it. Come on, how pathetic is that, a cable company wont help you unless you have a direct connection to the modem? I cant even think of one person I know that doesnt use some sort of hub or router or crossover setup...

Finally, I get pissed enough that I just hang up on that n00b and I just wing it myself.
It works, I'm back on the net 5 hours later, and more pissed off than ever.

Grrrrr.....

 

[datalink7]

Something like this happened to my dad. Our phone wasn't working half the time, and the dsl didn't work at all (this is for QWEST btw.). We call QWest, and tell them the problem. They say they will send someone out when we are there. They then of cource come when we aren't, and leave a note saying "you don't have a phone line." WTF? How did they think we called them? So we call back, and they say they will send someone out again. They send someone out (yet again not when we are there like we asked), and he leaves a note saying nothing is wrong. My dad gets pissed, goes out to the box where the phone line comes in, and does some electrical work. He fixes it.

At the end of the month, they give him a bill of $60.00 for repairs. My dad got so pissed. He cancelled the service immediatly (is getting AT&T cable), and said they would have to sue him to get the money.

 

[PsychoAndy]

you should have seen my previous rant on rr tech support....here:

typical anantomy of a rr tech support call:
*call 1877twcfast*
*hold for stupid intial recordings, hit appropriate buttons*
*your tech support call is now being routed to a national call center in canada* (of course they dont tell you this, its rr customer common knoweledge)
*you are put on hold for 15 minutes waiting for a canadian tech. of the 15 minutes, a 10 minute recording is played for your listening enjoyment. it explains that people with windows nt need to download a patch from (and they spell this site out, letter by letter, like were idiots) w-w-w-.-m-i-c-r-o-s-o-f-t-.-c-o-m. you should be aware that code red is clogging up our servers and creating latencty. blah blah blah....tirade continues.

15 minutes later

ok, now at this point you get the canadian tech asking for all your billing info and junk. he tells you to "power cycle your modem". pull the plug for 15 sec and then plug it back in. you could have done this 10 times already but they tell you to do it again anyways. then they tell you some crap that they need to create a ticket number, take another 5 minutes filling it out, and dosnent help you much. they'll tell you to keep power cycling the modem and wait 5 minutes, basically a stall manueuver to keep you from calling back. if youre lucky he hands you off to a local technician and they actually know whats wrong with the network and can tell you if a car crashed into the local node, if theres a power outage, or if a squirrell chewed through one of your cable drops (squirrells can actually chew through coax cable) etc...they schedule techs to come help you and to see if theres a physical problem with the cable.

other than the awful runaround tech support (a good idea is to call the local number and get them to switch you direct to the local techs.....that saves me about 30 min a call and usually somebodys available immediatley) they're pretty much ok imho.

 

[Platypus]

Haha good for him. There was one compitent lady there. One. Out of 3 tech guys. I wish the tech guys were trained to handle situations that involve the word "NIC" and "no, winipcfg will NOT work in 2k". My tech knew neither of these facts...
*sigh*