Teleidoscope

Tue, Aug 07, 2007

Phone Company

Posted at 1:32 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

I just spent 20 minutes on the phone with the phone company (Qwest). It's amazing that they don't supply decent lines to their customer support personnel I could hardly hear the guy I spoke to and had to keep asking him to speak louder. The problem was not on my end, because the advertisements they played when I was on hold were very loud.

They also need to fix their computer system so it accepts email addresses with hyphens in them, which are perfectly legal by internet standards even though Microsoft sometimes doesn't support them well.

The main reason I called them was that I happened to notice that my white pages entry still has my house's old street address (even though the county changed it in 1999) and I told Qwest to update their records when it happened. Maybe someday they will get their databases to be consistent: even though the white pages and billing address should now match, I'll bet their repair database will still be wrong. I've only told the repair guys to fix their listing every couple of years, when the mice chew on the lines.

While I was on the line, the rep offered to improve the speed of my internet connection (at an increased cost, of course). That change is supposed to go in Friday.

It will be interesting to see if You-tube and other streamed media become usable instead of pausing every few seconds. If the DSL change doesn't help, I'll take a look at my DSL modem and router to see if they are choking the connections. Since I have to run Flash to get at my bank's site, I might as well be able to take advantage of it.

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