Hi Ky!
Not-totally-unexpected follow-up to this portion:
> KM> Did I gripe about CenturyLink yet? they changed my loop -- it got So latter portion of the morning. I'm up here in the Computer Room with Autumn. Not too much for her to do up here but it's different, she's somewhat interested in the computers and projects; the Computer Desk has
a shelf that pulls out which she uses to draw. I notice the phone is off-hook; figure a phone call is being made downstairs while Autumn is occupied up here.
Who is Autumn??
Our six year old granddaughter.
Eventually getting to be lunchtime so we go downstairs. "You were on
the phone?" "No, why?" Quick check: phones are on the hook. Oh-oh! I
have an 'indoor demarc' which I created decades ago so if there was a problem with the phones could disconnect and plug in the 'emergency
phone'. Plug that in - dead. Not even dead air.
Well, that's not promising!
Nope. Wasn't all that unexpected, just verifed it was outside. BTW, in
the past have found one simply doesn't unplug the house and then plug the emergency phone right away: one needs to wait about a minute for the
phone system to reset.
Call the landline from my cell phone: busy. So the outside line probably shorted out. It had drooped from when we had the derecho (big wind
storm) last month. Was going to call and have fixed. So I'm thinking
the phone line outside stretched a little more, tore the insulation and
now the two wires are touching each other.
Or just plain pulled loose at some point, but the copper break is invisible inside the stretchy insulation. Not surprising after
the whole durn thing tried to blow away completely!
In this case the line pulled loose during the derecho: I was taking
pictures of the neighbour's tree that had fallen into our back yard
(more for insurance purposes) and 'noticed' a largish branch had become entangld in the lines to the house (electrical, old cable, phone), At
that time noticed the telephone lines were lower than normal (one is
live with voice, the other was for the data line).
Called CenturyLink's repair; fiddle with the automated portion for a
while (four minutes?), then get to a live person -- we'll just say "not
from this country", plus I could here another person nearby in the background with the same accent.
Philippines. Being quite annoyed with their lack of usefulness, I
asked their Twitter rep, who at least makes an effort, but
couldn't do anything for me.
Hmm: quite possible. And now that you mentioned it I recall that bit of trivia. I can't say the guy I was talking to was unhelpful (unlike the
idiots I talked to years ago with my DSL noise issue): he did run some
tests which pretty much verified what I had already checked but probably
99% of the customers don't have the background. The only thing I found annoying was couldn't get repair out the next day as in the past -- OTOH
not his fault, maybe a bunch of the local repair crew were assigned to
repair the hurricane damage.... Not like we don't have the cell phones
as an alternative.
Tho the accent (all alike, all SIX of the different pleasant but
useless people I spoke with) sounded to me vaguely African, so at
a guess, migrants. Definitely not native Spanish speakers, nor
like any Filipinos I've known.
My guy might have been an Indian immigrating to the Phillipines! <g>
So I called Wednesday late morning; a
tech won't be out until Friday sometime between 8:15 and 4:15. ...Keep
the cell phone near!
Indeed... I don't even have a landline anymore, other than what
the DSL uses. I don't use the phone enough to bother beyond the
cheap Verizon prepay (I have it set at $15/mo. but if you only
use it two days per month, could pay as little as $5 -- it's two
bucks per day of use, no limits) but someone gift me an older
iPhone which I keep meaning to hook up with Ting...
pay-as-you-use, no contract, $6.95/mo. minimum.
That sounds like a very good deal! We're with TracFone which around
here piggybacks on Verizon. Mine is $25 every other month (so $13 a
month) and his is $9 every month -- earlier this year they screwed up
the automatic payment so service was temporarily dropped. Doesn't use
it enough to notice was 'dead' for around a week.
Good plans for our use but I don't think would be good for you as not
enough data.
And found the number of the very good local Centurylink tech
(knew I saved his card for a reason!), called him, he's still on
the job and is supposed to come check things out later today.
Whether he'll be able to FIX anything is a different matter.
Good! Hopefully something relatively simple. Years ago the problem I
had had with the sometimes slow to dropping out DSL was a bad port at
the Central Office. They physically moved by line from one computer to
another (I was told 'across the room') and that fixed that!
¯ BarryMartin3@ ®
¯ @MyMetronet.NET ®
... Elbow macaroni. Why not wrist, hip or knee macaroni?
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