The slow painful death of Mr. Snowman
ATT U-Verse sucks
A lot of you have asked about our ATT Uverse experience, 140 characters does not allow me enough space to really throw it all out there so I’ll tumblr it.
First of all, U-Verse is fantastic for the price. It is way cheaper for what we get verses Comcast. We have the second highest programming tier, the second fastest internet tier, and phone service all for quite a bit less than what Comcast could offer. So Uverse on the surface is very appealing and is a great deal … when it works that is.
We hooked up the service in November of 2008, not long after we moved into the house. It was a good offer: cheaper programming, could get fully refunded if not satisfied after 60 days, $200 gift card for signing up, no installation cost… really a great deal. And it worked great for about 3 months.
That is when about every 30 minutes or so the entire system would lock up. Since everything runs from one base unit your TV, internet, and phone would all go out together. I called customer service, which had some of the least helpful people I’ve ever seen who had a swell idea of just restarting the box and that fixes everything. Well it does fix everything for a couple of hours and then it starts up again. So I called back, they asked me to restart, told me everything was fine and ended the call, problem again. I went through this cycle 4 or 5 times before I threw a fit and asked for a tech to come out.
A tech came out and told us there was nothing wrong and left. The cycle of customer service calls started again and got another guy. This guy tried to do the same thing and I threw a fit. He finally told me off the record this was a common problem and gave me the number to a higher level field tech who was able to make higher decisions. That guy came out and told us it was the line going from the pole to the house, supposedly replaced it and did some other things.
Everything worked fine until May or June and it started acting up again, went through the cycle of customer service, had someone come out, this time they couldn’t figure out the problem and after a week or two it cleared up again. This time I complained also with customer service that I had never received my promised $200 for signing up, they told me they had no clue what I was talking about, despite the fact that they were still running that promotion.
Now on to around August/September, same problem again, same cycle of customer service, finally got someone out and they said it was because they were doing some work in the area, he screwed around with a few things and promised me it was fixed. It started working again, but it was obvious that it was running more sluggish this time. The image would get very pixelated constantly and the internet speed as slow.
I put up with this for another few months until it had reached the point where the internet was terribly slow. Went through the run around again, finally got someone out in late December. This guy initially tried to do nothing and leave, I was not very happy with that and complained. He asked what all had been done physically and I told him that line. He went out to inspect it to find that they never replaced the line at all. This guy recommended bypassing a surge protector that was between the line in and the house wiring that ATT puts in, which of course he assured was totally unnecessary. He did that, it worked but still a little worse than originally.
Now that brings me to this week, which has been the worst of all. The system freezes roughly every 15 minutes, and even when it does work the picture is unwatchable. We called customer service and actually got a decent rep that told us she honestly had no clue what the problem was with our system, but she had heard a lot of people complaining lately. For me this is the end of it. The price is great but I would rather pay a little more for something that actually works. I am tired of taking off a day of work to deal with a tech who just tries to get out of the house as fast as humanly possible.
Comcast has its flaws, no doubt about it. But at this point I would rather deal with that and actually be able to use the internet and watch TV. During the process of writing this the system has lost service 4 times by the way.
Sweet Home Chicago
So after 16 or 17 years, I am going to go back to visit Chicago. It doesn’t seem like that big of a deal, but for me it feels a little like a home coming.
Responding to Situations with Social Media
I have two things lately that I am publically passionate about: social media and photography (I am equally passionate about politics but I keep it off the radar most of the time). Normally I reserve this space to express photography, my thought is that between my work with Tweetup, Southern Socials, and RefreshCA anyone who cares about my take on social media has heard it several times. Today however I wanted to take a brief moment to highlight something great in social media that probably went unnoticed yesterday.
