We Are Stardust

and we've gotten ourselves back to the garden!

Thursday is date night for me and Mr. Honey and right before we left, At&T called to say they were stopping by to check out the problem with the DSL service. I had called Earthlink and asked them to connect me with someone who was stateside, not because I didn't want to speak with anyone in Asia, but because they only could do so much and I needed to escalate the problem. The operator connected me to executive services and a man named Blake.

Blake promised to send the situation to his crackpot team of technicians. That was on Monday. On Tuesday, I got a call from Tim. We went through everything and he determined the problem was with AT&T (which we already knew) so he contacted them and today, right before we left for dinner (because the window for arrival was between 8am and 8pm) a nice man named Jose called to say he was coming out.

Jose came out and said he had other Earthlink customers who were having the same problem because Earthlink migrated their usage contract from one carrier to another and a boat load of Earthlink customers got dropped. The solution, he said, was to have the central office reassign the port the dsl service came through so it would feed through to my house.

Simple enough. Except it was after five and no one in the central office works after 4:30 and it's about a five hour fix. I got Tim on the phone and he and Tim talked and as Jose was leaving, he saw another AT&T truck with another customer. So they talked as well. Tim told me he was going to check to see how ports were to be changed and if the central office had to do it. They all said tomorrow. Tomorrow should see the end of my torment..

At this point, what was another day? So, Mr. Honey took me out to dinner at a place we hadn't been to in a long time. We had a nice dinner and I came back home, did some knitting, watched two episodes of The Nanny and came upstairs to the office just to stroke the modem and remind it that it wasn't its fault.

I have dsl service! Some little fairy must have stayed at the central office or Tim twisted someone's arms because I am back and up and running! Life has returned to something looking like normal.

My great thanks to Blake for getting involved and to Tim for working diligently on this for the past three days. They did in three days what the rest couldn't manage in the previous ten. When you have an Internet based business, you kinda need the Internet to do your thing. I was thinking of places to take my laptop that had free wi-fi so I could work. Now, I can work in my own home. And the router is up and running as well so I should be able to work downstairs when I have to. I appreciate the work they did to get me up and running. I appreciate how they kept me in the loop and talked me through what was going on. It did a great deal to keep me calm and patient.

It's a restoration of faith. That's what it is. And I am grateful.