Rejoining the wired (or wireless) world!

Wow. I feel so disconnected. We just recovered from a 4 day service issue that made me realize just how addicted we are to some sort of connectivity.

Last Friday, we made the exciting switch from Charter cable to AT&T Uverse. We were excited and everything worked great Friday, so we called Charter to disconnect. Saturday we finished hooking everything else up and then everything went out. No internet, no wireless, no cable so no TV.

Sunday we couldn't figure out what to wear -- what was the weather going to be like???? Didn't there used to be phone numbers for time and temperature or something? Oh yeah, we DO have an antenna hooked up to one of our TVs. Phew, crisis averted.

I have a long four or five page letter detailing the saga. It started kind of average, got really bad in the middle, and then ended in something a bit stupid on our end, which slowed down my five page saga! Basically we had everything working, then apparently had an ethernet connection issue, but this all happened at the same time as AT&T had some crazy flood in the basement of a hub in St. Louis and they lost their ability to fix stuff. Literally. One whole day, they couldn't accept incoming calls -- AT&T, a PHONE COMPANY, lost PHONE SERVICE. Then they couldn't dispatch repairs. The whole time, there was some outage in the software that wouldn't allow them to switch out my modem, and once that was all finally fixed and I switched out my own modem at midnight on Monday night (I was the official field tech after getting a replacement modem from a tech who couldn't switch it while the software was down) it ended in a bad connection found today in a ethernet cable. Hmmmm - not sure which was the root cause of the really bad first weekend of Uverse. The ethernet cable was our issue, but the others some combination of bad luck (Modem zapped or something), a flood, service outage, and an install where not quite everything got hooked up by the tech (she installed one of our computers, but we have a few more than that. It is embarressing to say just how many).

In the middle of all my AT&T visits, charter came by to disconnect my STILL WORKING cable service. Some kind of cruel universal humor or kharma for breaking away from the cable company.

And I managed to reach out in the middle of this via a visit to McDonalds to use their WiFi hotspot! Megan didn't complain about this at all on Sunday. She got to play - a good reason to take your laptop to McDonalds to pass the sliding time!

It is a much longer story than this even, but for now I just want to say "Yeah! We are back!" and "We know what to wear tomorrow! It'll be chilly!"