Life In the Slow Lane

You know what they say about "Act in haste, repent in leisure?" Well, after my Verizon DSL modem kicked the proverbial bucket, I canceled my DSL. Suddenly, I'm off the grid, and the WWW. Before I go into "internet withdrawal," I had to figure out a way to connect somehow as the cable triple play install isn't going down till next week due to scheduling issues.

While my last three desktops didn't have a dialup modem, my notebook does. Who knew it would come to this? So, forget about high speed connections, and streaming content. YouTube and flash are the enemy. I'm reduced to email, and low bandwidth websites for my internet fix. Thankfully, NetZero has a free plan that allows 10 hours a month, so I'm sure I'll have them all used up before the Optimum folks show up next week (I wasn't signing up for AOL no matter what).

In the meantime, no word from Verizon. I figure they'll call again when they get the request to port my phone number, which I'm totally guessing, will be later this week. My broken DSL modem has hit the bottom of the garbage pail, and I'm done with DSL. From now on, it's either cable modem or Fios- at least until something better comes along. If Verizon can offer me a triple play offer that's cheaper than Optimum I'll go for it, in the meantime, I'm humming the "You've got cable" tune that they played too many times last summer.

I've had a copper Verizon phone line for as many years as I've been alive, and that's decades at this point. I've also had DSL since 2005. If they wanted someone more loyal to their company as a customer, I don't think they were finding it, and my bill is always paid on time. If Verizon couldn't just send me a modem, and forced me to jump ship, then clearly their customer service is as screwed up as they say it is.

In the meantime, I'm counting the moments till I can download at more than 56k (not to mention upload at faster than a very pokey 36k), and that's downhill with a tailwind. I'll gladly endure a disconnected week because this will be worth it.

Jonas

In a related programming note, there will be no Nudgecast this week as dialup is going to allow this. Stay tuned to hear me rant about how this all turned out.