Sábado, Junho 17, 2006
Back for the wrong reasons
And here I am back in my old blog. Good thing I never deleted it.
The thing is, my own domain luminescente.com is down and it will take sometime to bring it back up. Blame it on me for hosting it at home on a miserable 128kbps upstream courtesy (not!) of Cabovisão.
Last week there was a lot of thunderstorm back at home and apparentely either the cable modem died (a 5-year old RCA DCM105 bread-toaster look-alike) or their equipment is screwed. Either way, my folks thought it could be a temporary outage so decided to wait.
Now a couple of days later, they're still offline and the cable modem acts funny, like serving the same DHCP IP address for the last days. I had left at home a almost brand-new modem I had leftover from my appartment in Viseu, already used on their network, so I told them to just call Rabovisão, tell them the MAC address and try it on. Should take 5 minutes I tought. It seems that this needs to be done in a properly printed, signed piece of paper (oh! the damn habit to want to have it all in paper), and that it would cost 25.50 euros to change 12 characters in a damn database.
Ok, what are the other options? Schedule with a technician to come over and diagnose the problem (which I did already, it's the damn modem or the cable line), but it will take at least 5 days to have one available. Then they noticed the last bill was not paid. Yes it was, I said, my brother went yesterday to pay it at one of your points of sale. Oh, they said, it's still not in the "system", you have to wait at least 72 hours until it becomes available, if you prefer faster service, fax us the proof of payment (the multibanco ticket). IT WAS PAID ON YOUR PREMISES. CANT YOU HAVE YOUR COLLEAGUE CONFIRM THAT IT WAS ALREADY PAID?
Apparently not. Morons!
What irks me the most is that the competition is right there on the same level. TVRAbo has a "free" cable kit in the stores that costs 25 euro to "activate". Would they let me have a dozen of free kits and get away with it if did not want activation, and instead just wanted to hammer them to small bits, spray them with gasoline, throw a Zippo at it and call it art?
The thing is, my own domain luminescente.com is down and it will take sometime to bring it back up. Blame it on me for hosting it at home on a miserable 128kbps upstream courtesy (not!) of Cabovisão.
Last week there was a lot of thunderstorm back at home and apparentely either the cable modem died (a 5-year old RCA DCM105 bread-toaster look-alike) or their equipment is screwed. Either way, my folks thought it could be a temporary outage so decided to wait.
Now a couple of days later, they're still offline and the cable modem acts funny, like serving the same DHCP IP address for the last days. I had left at home a almost brand-new modem I had leftover from my appartment in Viseu, already used on their network, so I told them to just call Rabovisão, tell them the MAC address and try it on. Should take 5 minutes I tought. It seems that this needs to be done in a properly printed, signed piece of paper (oh! the damn habit to want to have it all in paper), and that it would cost 25.50 euros to change 12 characters in a damn database.
Ok, what are the other options? Schedule with a technician to come over and diagnose the problem (which I did already, it's the damn modem or the cable line), but it will take at least 5 days to have one available. Then they noticed the last bill was not paid. Yes it was, I said, my brother went yesterday to pay it at one of your points of sale. Oh, they said, it's still not in the "system", you have to wait at least 72 hours until it becomes available, if you prefer faster service, fax us the proof of payment (the multibanco ticket). IT WAS PAID ON YOUR PREMISES. CANT YOU HAVE YOUR COLLEAGUE CONFIRM THAT IT WAS ALREADY PAID?
Apparently not. Morons!
What irks me the most is that the competition is right there on the same level. TVRAbo has a "free" cable kit in the stores that costs 25 euro to "activate". Would they let me have a dozen of free kits and get away with it if did not want activation, and instead just wanted to hammer them to small bits, spray them with gasoline, throw a Zippo at it and call it art?
