1930E:
It seems nothing in the repertoire of telecommunications is quite as adept at instilling a state of angry frustration as the infernal voice-recognition menu systems that have become popular in recent years. The stupid things invariably fail to recognize the inputs they've declared to be valid, and I invariably end up just repeating "Just give me a human, you stupid system" until the system finally drops through to a human. I'm getting quite used in particular to having to deal with Verizon's, because it seems that about once a month or so, Verizon fumbles the ball and our DSL service just suddenly stops passing data. We still have link, but we no longer have IP transport. Fixing this invariably ends up involving resetting our Verizon access password at least once, sometimes several times. It usually turns out to be a problem on Verizon's end. This time, just like last time, so far they don't even know what's wrong. I fully expect that this time, just like last time, it will turn out to be a hardware problem they weren't aware that they had. At this point, it's been down about an hour and a half.
There are no words to express how badly I miss Speakeasy service. It Just Worked, and on the very rare occasions when it broke, the guy on the tech support line not only had clue about what he was doing, but was ready and willing to accept that you knew what you were talking about too.
I must remember to update my LJ phonepost authentication information, so that the next time this happens I can at least phone post to let people know we're down.
Update, 0004E
The connection came back up about fifteen minutes ago. It took ten of those to get through to Verizon DSL tech support to get them to reset our authentication password which, yes, once again, they had blown away in the course of fixing the problem.
I suppose at least they're consistent.
