Week O' Whinin': A biyearly tradition (sort of)

Image nicked from BobsOldPhones.net
Original owner: Brit Ericsson

Things have come to a pretty pass in many special ways, so I decided to devote a week to whining about them. There was a Week O' Whinin' back in the Spring of '08, but I have decided as Blogger in Chief that enough time has passed that I can have another one.

It's my blog and I'll whine if I want to.

The first whine is short but it involves customer service, so it just feels more special.

My internet service is working fine, but my phone over the VOIP was acting up. I was getting no dial tone when I picked up the phone, but it would ring, though I couldn't answer it. The answering machine could take a message. And then, even that wasn't working.

Very strange.

So I go online to Live Chat with a customer service rep for Earthlink, and I keep getting cut off. Six times I try, but soon enough I type stuff on my computer but it won't show up in the Live Chat window. Grr! The connection is still good, I can do other Internetty kinds of stuff, but not the Live Chat.

Finally, I get to the end of a conversation with someone who tells me the problem is my phone. I don't have another phone to check this premise, but I go to a neighbor and borrow their phone and plug it into my system and sure enough, Kenrick K. of Earthlink is right.

My current state of broke-assedness is bad but not awful (a whine later this week about that), but I am without my bicycle (a whine about that tomorrow). Luckily, there's a thrift store in walking distance, they had a phone for sale for $3.25, so I once again have the 21st Century convenience of the Internets and the 20th Century convenience of a land line.

Yay, convenience!

p.s. My old phone was not nearly as old as the old phone in the picture. But it also didn't look anywhere near as nice.