D-Day
For some people Friday the 13th is the Most Unlucky Day.
For me, it's Monday the 13th...and specificially Monday, June 13.
It was this day eight years ago that my future ex-husband walked out on me.
Today, it was a day of Internet disasters and badly-timed phone calls.
So, here's how it stared: on Saturday, I noticed that my browser was having some trouble loading Yahoo. All text, no pics and seriously slow. I figured it was probably a problem on Yahoo's side, so I let it go and enjoyed my Sunday.
This morning, I fired up Earthlink, then Internet Explorer. Everything appered to be fine....until I got to Yahoo where, again, I got all text, no pic, and very slow.
So, I called Earthlink. I then got caught in a 3-hour clusterfuck with tech support in India that resulted in me dismantling Earthlink. I now have no ISP, my bookmarks are hopefully stored somewhere with my Earthlink profile in the ether, and my browser is still kaflooie. (I'm over Steady Eddie's now...his stuff is fine).
I was amazed the hoops that the India tech support had me jump thru...which resulted in changing my taskbar, some of my shortcuts, shut down some programs that were running that had nothing to do with the browser, and, like I mentioned, the total dismantling of any Earthlink services.
When I finally got thru to Level 2 tech support, or "Master" tech support (what a giggle there) the first person I spoke with had me do some re-configurations because he thought that I had some corruped files that would not let me view secured sites like Yahoo. After we did our fancy code-inspired mumbo jumbo to correct this, "Victor" (if that's even his real name) figured everything would be fine.
But when I fired things up again, I still could not get anything other than text when I went to Yahoo. So, having been off the phone with Victor, I called in and got "James" who then said that the problem might be that my browser was unstable and didn't want to download Yahoo properly.
Oh, and somewhere in there someone also thought there might be a piece of spyware screwing things up, but I cleansed it of everything....so, the chances of that are low. And the dude I spoke to at Yahoo said their servers are fine, but sometimes Internet Explorer just decides it doesn't like Yahoo any more and the only way to get the Yahoo home page is thru the MSN browser, which the MSN people thought was quite funny considering Yahoo and MSN are competitors...I think the Yahoo guy was somking something early this morning, or hadn't had the sufficient amount of Mountain Dew yet to kick his brain in gear.
At James' suggestion, I downloaded Mozilla...which would not let me connect to mozilla.org to finish the installation.
I then tried to download Netscape 8, but it wouldn't let me do that either...something about a proxy server. Who the heck knows.
I had to stop at BestBuy to pick up an Earthlink Total Access 2005 disk with their particular spyware cleanser and whatever other bells and whistles they have. The tech guys were going to send me one, but it won't get here for 6-10 business days.
And what am I supposed to do about Internet access until then, pray tell, Professor Einstein????
I picked up the new Earthlink disc from Best Buy and will try to install Total Access 2005 tomorrow. Hopefully I will get my identity and my bookmarks back.
In between, I received a phone call from the Director of the film festival I worked at in the fall, and mentioned setting up a blog, and he asked me what a blog was, and I drew a blank because I was also on the line with tech support, so I had to tell the director that I couldn't really talk because my computer blew up....and he said he'd get in touch with me again early next week and I hope I didn't screw up a good opportunity.
I thought my head was going to explode. I had a half-bowl of cereal with slightly spoiled milk for breakfast and a smoothie and a granola bar around 4 for "lunch."
Could it get any worse????
It is now 7:30. There are only a few more hours left of the day. I am going to eat some dinner and try to relax and pray that nothing else untoward will smack me in the face like a wet towel from now until bedtime.
I am keeping my fingers crossed.
For me, it's Monday the 13th...and specificially Monday, June 13.
It was this day eight years ago that my future ex-husband walked out on me.
Today, it was a day of Internet disasters and badly-timed phone calls.
So, here's how it stared: on Saturday, I noticed that my browser was having some trouble loading Yahoo. All text, no pics and seriously slow. I figured it was probably a problem on Yahoo's side, so I let it go and enjoyed my Sunday.
This morning, I fired up Earthlink, then Internet Explorer. Everything appered to be fine....until I got to Yahoo where, again, I got all text, no pic, and very slow.
So, I called Earthlink. I then got caught in a 3-hour clusterfuck with tech support in India that resulted in me dismantling Earthlink. I now have no ISP, my bookmarks are hopefully stored somewhere with my Earthlink profile in the ether, and my browser is still kaflooie. (I'm over Steady Eddie's now...his stuff is fine).
I was amazed the hoops that the India tech support had me jump thru...which resulted in changing my taskbar, some of my shortcuts, shut down some programs that were running that had nothing to do with the browser, and, like I mentioned, the total dismantling of any Earthlink services.
When I finally got thru to Level 2 tech support, or "Master" tech support (what a giggle there) the first person I spoke with had me do some re-configurations because he thought that I had some corruped files that would not let me view secured sites like Yahoo. After we did our fancy code-inspired mumbo jumbo to correct this, "Victor" (if that's even his real name) figured everything would be fine.
But when I fired things up again, I still could not get anything other than text when I went to Yahoo. So, having been off the phone with Victor, I called in and got "James" who then said that the problem might be that my browser was unstable and didn't want to download Yahoo properly.
Oh, and somewhere in there someone also thought there might be a piece of spyware screwing things up, but I cleansed it of everything....so, the chances of that are low. And the dude I spoke to at Yahoo said their servers are fine, but sometimes Internet Explorer just decides it doesn't like Yahoo any more and the only way to get the Yahoo home page is thru the MSN browser, which the MSN people thought was quite funny considering Yahoo and MSN are competitors...I think the Yahoo guy was somking something early this morning, or hadn't had the sufficient amount of Mountain Dew yet to kick his brain in gear.
At James' suggestion, I downloaded Mozilla...which would not let me connect to mozilla.org to finish the installation.
I then tried to download Netscape 8, but it wouldn't let me do that either...something about a proxy server. Who the heck knows.
I had to stop at BestBuy to pick up an Earthlink Total Access 2005 disk with their particular spyware cleanser and whatever other bells and whistles they have. The tech guys were going to send me one, but it won't get here for 6-10 business days.
And what am I supposed to do about Internet access until then, pray tell, Professor Einstein????
I picked up the new Earthlink disc from Best Buy and will try to install Total Access 2005 tomorrow. Hopefully I will get my identity and my bookmarks back.
In between, I received a phone call from the Director of the film festival I worked at in the fall, and mentioned setting up a blog, and he asked me what a blog was, and I drew a blank because I was also on the line with tech support, so I had to tell the director that I couldn't really talk because my computer blew up....and he said he'd get in touch with me again early next week and I hope I didn't screw up a good opportunity.
I thought my head was going to explode. I had a half-bowl of cereal with slightly spoiled milk for breakfast and a smoothie and a granola bar around 4 for "lunch."
Could it get any worse????
It is now 7:30. There are only a few more hours left of the day. I am going to eat some dinner and try to relax and pray that nothing else untoward will smack me in the face like a wet towel from now until bedtime.
I am keeping my fingers crossed.
posted by Tish Grier at 6:58 PM
2 Comments:
Ah Tish, that truly sucks.
I have to admit though, I am tempted to get you in touch with J, seeing as how he's local to you and does computer work for a living. I can assure you it'd be much more entertaining than tech support on the phone.
-Soli
The upshot of this debacle is this: I spoke to yet another Master tech this a.m., who said that the problem was with my SP2 download. He was furious that the other tech people did not even ask if I was getting red x's where the Yahoo graphics should be and that they didn't listen when I told them I had red x's... he also said I should *never* have been on the line with India for 3 hours.
He mentioned filling out the customer service surveys and mentioning the cellphone minutes I used on the wasted tech calls.
He also recommended I call HP, which I did, and we did a system recovery which fixed alot of problems. I then backed up all my personal files to CD, then exported my bookmarks and downloaded them to a floppy.
Next, I went on to microsoft and completed the download for SP2. I now know if there are any further problems, it's probably with the SP2.
I'm also going to download Mozilla. I tried to do that yesterday, and it wouldn't send the correct message to mozilla.org, but I think now that everything's pretty much fixed, I can do that.
As if I didn't have better things to do over the past two days.
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