The great dialup adventure is history.

Dialup, for generalized (i.e., home, or personal) use would probably be workable. But my productivity level dropped fairly significantly, and adding just a couple of minutes to everything that I need to do online adds up after awhile. So, in mid-July, I had this planted in the garden.

Why this space? It’s close to the run for the television satellite dish, allowed the access hole to be drilled right next to the tv dish cabling, has a clear view of the sky, and was a good enough place for a six foot pole to sprout from the ground without being an eyesore. Since that area of garden one has nothing in it, and won’t, that’s where I decided to have the installation done.

I set up a wireless network in the house, so now everyone has access to it, and my personal productivity levels have gone back to what they were – and that allows me to get things done and get outside for work there.

Thanks, person who shall remain nameless, for reminding us just why we do anything at all for people.

“Your righteous attitude and cold indifference to my plight are disappointing. Cancel my account again.”

Ah, yes. You were the one who wrote to us instead of your old host to cancel your account and didn’t bother to make any backups of your Very Important Files. This is what we get for digging around to find what we could for the account rather than just telling you outright you were out of luck because our terms clearly state that we don’t retain backups of removed accounts. A sure indication of…well, nothing like you’re saying. Next time maybe you’ll use that tiny brain of yours before you do something. At the moment, you’re just a regular, run of the mill jackass blaming someone else for your own failure. I’d be surprised, but quite frankly, we’ve seen it all too often.

1. When we tell you to log into your control panel, this means YOUR control panel. Not the demo account. Not ours. Yours. It’s not a mystery to us as it is to you why you can’t log in if you’re not trying to log in at the right place.

2. Don’t be surprised when we take major offense to your suggestion that we’re not providing the services for which you’ve paid. And don’t think for a minute we’ve misinterpreted your remark and act indignant when we call you on something. If there’s one thing that my time on the brink with cancer taught me, it’s that people spend far too much time just rattling off whatever comes into their tiny brains than thinking about what they’re about to say.

3. If you’re going to sign your emails with the title “web designer” then maybe you should learn some rudiments about actually doing just that. Like properly uploading files to your web folder instead of opening a ticket, telling us you have done just that, and then letting us find that you didn’t. Furthermore, don’t open yet another ticket saying that you can’t figure out how to get files there and then blithely say you’ll just upload them and let us move them each time.

4. When you open a ticket, and we respond to it – and can see that you did receive the response – don’t open yet another ticket, on the same issue, acting as if you didn’t receive that response. The answer isn’t going to change.

5. Finally, don’t ask us when we’re going to change something “as other competitive web hosts are doing” because you don’t want to pay more than you’re paying. There’s a reason people leave our service to go to one of those “competitive” services offering everything in the world for just a couple of bucks a month and then suddenly reappear on our doorstep. In one case, that boomerang lasted less than 24 hours.

That is all.

I despise crappy service. I really do. In fact, it was one of the reasons my then business partner and I started our own company.

It isn’t every day, though, that you find a rather stunning example of bad service – so amazing that at first it’s annoying, but then becomes rather puzzling, as there is no need for it and no possible explanation to give for it.

Case in point: we register domains for people. Lots and lots of domains. Today, we received an email from a tech at the registrar, telling us that one of our customers had been trying (unsuccessfully) to get in touch with us – yeah, I know, we of the round the clock coverage are just impossible to get in touch with about anything. The email we received also told us to see their “correspondence below”. It also included a notation to the person contacting them that the registrar had forwarded their email to us.

Problem: we received no forwarded email. There was no “correspondence below”. In fact, there was nothing at all to indicate who had contacted them, what they wanted, or what the message contained. So, off goes a response, telling them that it would be rather helpful if they’d include the correspondence they said they did, and that is copied to the email address of the person who contacted them (and this latter fact is noted for the registrar).

To which we receive a response from that same tech, asking us to contact the person who contacted them. Now, this just begins a downward spiral, because of course we did copy that other party and we did note this in our response – obviously, reading comprehension is not this guy’s strong point.

So, again, we ask for whatever correspondence there should have been, and tell him again that we did copy that other party, and perhaps someone could do something productive. Like let us know what the hell the issue was so we could address it.

Which led to the third party – who, as it happens, wound up being not only NOT the customer, but unconnected to the account in any way, shape, or form – telling us that our demeanor sucked, based on our pleas to the registrar to give us any shred of information that would be helpful. Which led to his mail being blocked to the entire network, because one thing we don’t need is random asshats who jump to faulty conclusions based on no information whatsoever.

In the end, we told everyone to have the client contact us themselves. Just as they have done in the past, via the very same methods they had used in the past, where they found their rare tickets answered politely, efficiently, and promptly, just like everyone else. Because we’re certainly not in the habit of releasing information about accounts or making modifications to account based on contacts from third parties.

*** Followup: as it turns out, despite the fact that it is mentioned nowhere in the email to us from the registrar, and despite the fact that it specifically states that they are forwarding the (presumed) client’s email to us….the presumed client didn’t contact them via email. They called. A fact mentioned exactly nowhere in the conversation back and forth today until I pointed out for the tech that we didn’t need lessons on service from him and that more crap from him about how we should be conducting ourselves would result in us pulling about 4K domains from that registrar and moving them elsewhere.

Remarkable, really. Such a simple issue – or it would be, with a little bit of common sense.

Poking along on dialup does a couple of things, really. It offers a lesson in patience, for one, but it also affords one the opportunity to reflect on the miracle that allows some people to get through their day to day lives without accidentally killing themselves or someone else through sheer stupidity.

Like the guy who told us he couldn’t access his account and complaining that he was “losing listeners”, but provided no details as to what his issue was. He then wrote back to us to cancel after being provided with his access details again, telling us he was “dissatisfied” that we were not going to set up his site for him because he was paying a per month fee for hosting and a per month fee for domain registration.

There are two things wrong with this picture. Well, more than that, but there are two that jump right out at us. First, it’s a brand new domain. Just how many visitors are you losing, exactly, to a domain that did not even exist before you ordered it? And secondly, just what part of the FAQ or the terms or the invoice did you fail to grasp that indicated domain fees are done on an annual basis? All of them, apparently. I won’t even get into the fact that we don’t do design or setups and don’t say anywhere that we do, or tell you that your local fifth grader could design your site for you for the fee you’re paying each month, because it won’t be done by a pro at that rate – or that you could just install a ready-made app right from the control panel of the account, so all you have to do is click the mouse a couple of times and then start typing up whatever inane crap you’re going to put out there for the world to see.

My favorite type of person, though, are those with signatures in their emails indicating their association with the IT world. Like the latest one I just closed out, who wrote in to cancel because they were having issues retrieving their email (although the logs showed that email was delivering quite nicely, thank you). He complained that they had written in a few days prior “with no resolution”. A check of the previous ticket shows that yep, it was responded, and we asked some followup questions. All of this from someone whose signature read “IT – Systems Administration”. Now, if it were me – and I’m just tossing this out there for consideration, mind you – if I achieved some lofty position in IT based on years of toil, and I contacted a vendor about an issue related to email, I’d probably use an email address I knew I could check. Say, one not at the domain I’m writing in about. Because then I wouldn’t need to bitch at the vendor about not receiving a response just because I was a complete dumbass for using an address at that domain. But hey, that’s just me. What the hell do I know.

In other news, today will be the first real yard work day around here, now that the old place is finished completely. That’s after I sign off on some paperwork at the accountant’s office, ship a motherboard back to the vendor as a DOA, and other assorted business things. At least the moving is finished, thankfully. I hate the process. But I love this particular result.

There’s a certain beauty in moving out to the country. Open space, no houses bunched so closely together that you can read your neighbor’s paper while they’re sitting on the can, the peace and quiet, the option to either jump in the pool or work in the garden, or walk the trails in the preserve behind the house, or just loll around with a book while sitting under a tree.

But then, there is one downside that we’ve just discovered.

A downside, you say? How can that be? The idyllic life has nothing to mar it!

Except for those of us who fairly live on the Internet currently: there is no high speed access in the area. No DSL, and the cable company doesn’t even have basic cable service out there, which means we’re suddenly finding ourselves getting the satellite folks out. And resigning ourselves to life with dialup, at least until the gigantic development about six miles away grows up into houses with people in them, at which point the cable people will realize that service should indeed exist out our way.

Naturally, those of us of a certain age remember the days of dialup. Some of us of a certain age remember the first waves of dialup, plugging along at 300 baud. Since living without access is not an option, and since living without this property is not an option, dialup it will be. Fortunately, I am not streaming videos or music from my laptop to the Internet at large (heck, if I wanted to do that, I have a 1 Gps connection available to me at the NOC within our network there).

Since support issues are so very quiet these days – aggressive server management will do that for you – really all I do is check in and answer tickets, and do command line server maintenance things for work. For play – well, I suppose trying to bring up cuteoverload on dialup would be an adventure in pain, and I’ll have to reserve all my iTunes purchases for trips to the NOC so they can download there to my laptop while I’m setting up servers.

I expect to be spending more time away from my laptop then I have been lately, and instead of sitting around on my ass all day long doing this or that for work, I expect to be carving out time for enjoying life. Gardening. Cooking things from my garden. Canning. Swimming, for the first time in a couple of years (especially now that I no longer have a hole in my abdomen). Walking the trails in the forest. Landscaping. Experimenting with recipes for hot sauces and salsas and other things that maybe one day will be for sale.

That sort of thing.