We should be back almost globally

Well an update to Friday’s post is in order. Marcy and I went to the Rogers Video store closest to us and were greeted with a hand-written note saying that they were out of swap modems and that they were expecting a shipment in Friday to help cope with the crush of people needing to exchange their cable modems. Since it was Friday and especially since I wasn’t swapping (I was upgrading to become extreme) I didn’t really concern myself with the note. However that didn’t affect my disappointment with the size of the line at the customer service desk. It was long. Being the end of the month, there were people paying their bills and since the desk also deals a little with Rogers Wireless customers, there were some of them thrown in for good measure.

I felt very badly for the customer service people behind the desk. Customers generally aren’t very nice but when they have a time constraint on an upgrade that they probably don’t understand why they have to do it, the annoyance levels skyrocket. On top of everything else, only the account holder could pick up a new modem so you had a lot of people whose spouses/whatever could not come to the store and the customer service people had to turn them away. Of course you could go to a website and order a courier to pick up your old modem (free of charge) but most people probably thought that it would be easier to go to the store. How wrong they were! I fail to understand why Rogers didn’t distribute enough modems to the various stores. They knew how many needed replacing and where these people lived. Wouldn’t it make sense to anticipate exchanges? Maybe they thought that more people would go with the courier plan.

The wireless customers were especially irritating. One guy was convinced that he could check his phone balance through the desk and even though the girl said “I don’t have access to Wireless here” he remained dogged in his pursuit of his balance. Finally he left though I still think he believed the girl was lying.

At any rate, the customer service person that dealt with me was “pleased as punch” (you can quote me on that) when I asked if I could upgrade to the Extreme high-speed. I guess anything different from what he had been dealing with was a welcome change. I paid my $79 plus tax to purchase my new Motorola modem. It gives me up to 5 Mbps downstream and 800 kbps upstream – a big improvement over the regular high-speed… speeds. Now all I need to do is get a new server capable of handling more than 5 requests at a time and I’ll be living in a golden paradise. Not Golden mind you but golden in the abstract sense.

Now the only problem that I have is having the new IP address propagate across the Internet. For some reason it’s taking a long time for my own ISP to update its DNS servers. I’m hoping that most people can now locate me and that the IP address won’t change too much in the future (who knows with the DHCP service that I get around here). Judging from my web server logs, most of the traffic has resumed so I think perhaps my DNS server is an isolated case right now.

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