Well, here we are, Day 10 of of Shelter in Place + our second day of zero internet connectivity.
No internet, no cable , no house phone.
After a surreal day and a half of trying to restart services, or reach Comcast ( generous offers to call me back- I'm 3,700 in line for that service) and an hour + 20 eternal minutes on phone hold, scrabbling about in the basement plugging and unplugging things, hitting on/off switches.....finally got a Comcast tech out this afternoon.
He seemed to be a nice young man, doing his very best, and I appreciate that he is still working under threat of the Roving Pox
But
He didn't even look at our modem, or cable box. Didn't enter the house.
He spent some time on the street, in the manhole where the cable that brings all knowledge, entertainment and relief lives.
( a.k.a. The cable feed that connects our home to the very needed interwebs)
Verdict: nothing wrong going on between that connector, and our equipment.
Problem: there's no signal coming in to feed our need for connection.
Gone.
Maybe never to been seen again.
He valiantly tried to explain to my senile , grey self, that when we had a power outage yesterday morning, we were "kicked off " the line that supplies our signal, as well as the signal of thousands of our neighbours. Now we're at the very back of that line.
Because there's a much higher than usual demand for said signal, when our modem tries to to power up and reconnect, there is no signal to connect to. There still isn't.
They're out of supply. No more juice.
A bit like seats on an oversold flight.
Sounds like a pretty sketchy, bullshitty explanation to me....
Is that really how internet signals work?
When I pressed him to find out why us, and nobody else on our street.....
He claimed it's completely random, beyond the control of Comcast.
His suggestions :
-try again between midnight and 5 am, when online traffic is lower.
Why, of course, that's exactly the time of day that we need the internet. Thank you.
- Please be patient, and " hope" that the signal will restore itself at some point in the future. No idea of when that future may be. A day? 3 days? A week?
When the pandemic is just a very bad memory?
I have no idea when that could be. Neither does he.
Basically, he just shrugged, and said " that's it. Can't help you. Can't do anything else right now. Bye, bye."
And left.
Absolutely Surreal.
2020 , a pandemic that demands us to stay home.
Our cable company just dumped us.
Basically, they're selling a service they're unable to provide. And in a crisis like the one we're innow, it's a very essential service.
They don't care. read more