{grump!} How do I dare complain, growl, grump, or crab about things like this? That is the question. Is my problem that I have to walk two miles with a pair of buckets hanging from a stick slung over my shoulders to gather water? Is my problem that we’re eating the dogs for dinner, after having run out of food? Is my problem that the water I’m about to haul back from the river contains a parasite that will cripple me and anyone who shares that fine dinner with me? Ohhhh no. No, no, no. My problem is that depositing $1344.17 worth of checks remotely took damn near 45 minutes, longer than it would have taken to make the round-trip drive to the credit union, park the car, walk across the parking lot, go inside, stand in line, and deposit the goddamn checks.
Mine is a First-World problem, no question of that.
Then I get on the phone to the Mayo, thereunto to fork over $234.45 in Medicare and Medigap reimbursements, am told the phone-tree wait will be over five minutes (horrors!), and am treated to annoying Muzak and repeated robotic announcements to the effect that it (the robot) is sorry for my inconvenience.
Really. Why AM I complaining?
The problem is, I’ve got SO many other things that need to be done today! I could have done this (pointless, overcomplicated) job faster if I’d just gotten in my car, consumed a gallon or two of gasoline, and driven up to the credit union.
The process of uploading checks is SOOO SLOOOWWWW and SOOO FRUSTRATING that I was ready to pick up a $2,000 iMac and THROW IT ACROSS THE ROOM before all that junk got uploaded.
I don’t know if it’s the bank’s system, my router, or Cox’s notoriously slow “high-speed” internet connection — for which speed one pays extra. The iMac kept telling me it was “looking for a connection,” which usually means the connection or the router is down. Again. Up and down and up and down and up and down like a yo-yo, which has become SOP for this thing.
Don’t know whether to try a new router or to change providers.
Has anybody tried CenturyLink? They’re advertising a high-speed connection for $19.95. “Up to 40 MBPS.” That would be “40 MBPS if you’re lucky,” right? Oh, here’s the fine print: “where available.” That would mean, then, “not available wherever you happen to be.”
Cox is charging $62.99. That amount is coming out of the corporate account, because virtually all of my email and browser usage is business-related in one way or another.
But…I’m afraid that if I cancel the Internet, they’ll tell me that the phone bill is some incredible bargain because it’s “bundled” (no such thing is shown on the bill, but you can be sure they’ll pull some number like that on me) and then jack up the phone bill through the roof. And I can’t afford to have my personal land-line bill go up. Plus I have no idea whether CenturyLink is what it says it is.
Ohhhhh….waitaminit. Yelp is awash in complaints from unhappy CenturyLink customers. And helle’s belle’s, over at CityData.com, we’re reminded that CenturyLink is actually Qworst by a newer name. And over here at ConsumerAffairs.com, here are the “Top 1,119 Complaints about CenturyLink“! Qwest, the Master of Customer Disservice...
Ugh. That flyer goes in the trash.
Welp, I guess I’ll have to try a new router first and then, failing that, try to get Cox to choke up a new modem…mine is six years old and may need to be updated.
*sigh* CenturyLink DSL is the devil we know. Not amazing, but seems to be marginally better service than the cable internet option we have in our area, which is Comcrap, err Comcast, and has even worse reviews than CenturyLink.
We switched from Cox to CenturyLink for phone, video, and data last year. No detectable difference in data speed but with improved reliability. So far, anyway.
After my misadventures with Qwest, I wouldn’t touch any company that had anything even vaguely to do with that outfit — even so much as having bought the thing out. Cox at least has halfway decent customer service, and except for the cost and the slow service — which very well could be from my hardware, not their doing — so far I haven’t had much to complain about.
Given that you feel that way, why ask if anyone has tried CenturyLink? I took the time to respond because you asked.
Because I found out belatedly.
Wow, what a day it must’ve been! Better change your provider, I think that’s the source of the slowness of your Internet.
Holy crud….Don’t throw that computer…not cheap to get fixed. I have experience with DD2’s Apple and was pleasantly surprised when hard drive was replaced under warranty… for FREE….another story… IMHO you have touched on the “holy grail” .. .the need for decent, reliable, affordable (cheap) internet service without all the crap …. ie…triple play…double play…free phone etc. Cable TV IMHO is toast…content cost are going up and subscribers are going down. The young are especially done….and want to watch what they want to watch when they want to watch it for cheap or FREE. We have Comcast and the service does seem to have improved but the price is outlandish and there is nothing on TV worth watching. I find myself watching you tube more and more. Give me reliable internet at a fair price and I’ll cut the cable tonight! As crazy as it sounds I have kept my landline with Verizon and to me it’s a bargain. For about $1 a day I have hassle free contact with anyone I wish to talk to and can even fax documents. In this era of $5 coffees …that’s a bargain!
Hi Funny – I’m a fan down in Tucson. I killed my Cox cable and phone a few months ago, but feared they’d pull the “unbundling” routine and jack up my internet bill. I don’t know if it was out of fear I’d move to the competition, but my internet bill hasn’t changed, so they may not gouge you on your phone if you drop their internet.
That said, before anything else, I’d HIGHLY recommend you replace both your modem and your wireless router. I’m certainly no IT expert, but a six-year old modem is getting a bit long in the tooth!
Additionally – from my personal experience – I’d look into buying both the router and modem myself. There’s usually a Cox representative lurking around most Best Buys in Az, if you’re concerned about buying something that won’t work with the Cox network.
Good luck!
That’s interesting. My son bought the router at Fry’s. I didn’t realize you could blithely buy a modem and attach it to Cox’s system. I wonder if you can get one at Costco, which has a better return policy…
Actually I think I’ll call Cox and see what they can do for me first. Don’t know if the modem that’s in there was sold to me or if it’s sort of rented as part of the service. Maybe they’ll trade it up for something better. Failing that, I’ll just out what kind of modem is needed and go buy one. We probably could use a new router, too.
I haven’t ever bought into cable TV. From the git-go, my feeling has always been that television should be free. The American public owns the airwaves, and we should not have to pay to use what is already ours. And as for cable: all very nice, I’m sure, if you’re a sports fan. But for the few of us who aren’t, cable is a hundred channels with nothing on.
When pay TV was first proposed to the American public as some kind of wondrous new technological advance, we were promised that if we ponied up a monthly fee for the privilege of plugging into the Vast Wasteland, there would be no advertising. That proved to be yet another slight misapprehension… Now you pay to be blitzed with ads. WHY would anyone do that?
I can understand that some people like to watch live broadcasts of overpaid wife-beating jocks running back and forth. But wouldn’t it be more fun to get off your duff and go play football, baseball, basketball, or soccer in the park? They do have teams for grown-ups…they play in our park all the time. That seems a) cheaper; b) a lot more interesting; and c) infinitely better for you.
You CAN get a cable Internet connection without the TV. Call and ask.
I’ll keep the land line until the communications monopolies stop providing them. A land-line phone doesn’t have to be recharged every few hours, it doesn’t get lost, and you can have as many extensions as you like. With a single set of cordless handsets from Costco, I have a phone in every room in the house, several of them near the floor where I can crawl over to one if I fall and break something. If I had a cell phone, it would be sitting on the kitchen counter and I wouldn’t have a chance of reaching it with a busted hip.
That is not a far-fetched scenario. The widow who owned my last house before me fell in her garage, and no one knew it. She lay on the garage floor for two days before a neighbor noticed the newspapers piling up and then found her. She died in the hospital a day later.
Well, we were paying $80 a month for land line and internet. So we dumped land line and pay $30 a month for Comcast. I know it’s only for a year, so another decision will have to be made at some point. We just use the cell phone (pay as you go). The land line phone was nothing but junk calls anyway.