Jane three weeks ago spent literally hours (about 4) on the phone with Comcast tech figuring out they’d sent us a bad gateway…this governs our phone, our tv, and our internet: and provides connectivity for our housenet. We’re not wired down to the coffeepot, but close.
Then we had to go through it all again when the new unit arrived. Meanwhile—my Comcast link for my Tivo unit suffered in the process of upgrade: it became outmoded, TIVO lost its programming, and became, essentially stupid.
So we had to order another module, and when it arrived, it took a couple of hours to get THAT set up: when TIVO goes stupid it takes a while to get it smart again.
Well…yesterday this guy in a yellow hardhat knocks at our door and says, “We’re from Avista Power, and we’ve got to change your transformer. Power will be out for an hour.”
Damn. So I needed to get to the store. I knew that would take about an hour. And of course getting out of the garage requires electricity (garage door opener.)
I back out, go to the store, come back—they’re still working, which means I can’t open the garage door to get the car in to get me to the back yard so I can get to the back door and come in. So I take all the frozen groceries in hand (4 bags) and hike to the front door. Which is locked. So I ring the bell. No Jane.
I set down the bags, one of which tears, spilling stuff onto the porch, get my key, get the door open…and no Jane. No Jane anywhere, upstairs or down. I leave the frozen stuff and go on a Jane-search. I check the back door in the theory that she could have realized I’d arrived and gone out the back way to help me…
Bash. I opened the back door right into Jane, who was standing outside taking pictures of the guys on the pole above our back fence.
So…I go back in and put the groceries away. Electricity comes back. Jane goes out to put the car in the garage and bring in the last groceries. All is well, the yellow-hat guys have gone, and we have a shiny-new transformer on the pole. For what reason we cannot figure, but hey—
We have no internet. We have phone. We have TV.
So…Jane had done a precautionary unplug when they started to work and a plug-in didn’t solve it. The house net is down. Nothing works..
We finally get a call through to Comcast bots who won’t help us because ‘we’re in an outage.’ Well, we friggin’ know we were in an outage, bot! It’s fixed! They drove away! We have no internet!
Took us another 30 minutes of trying to get an actual Comcast tech support guy on the line. He goes through the ‘outage’ mantra. Until Jane very wisely said: “Why do we have tv and phone, but no internet?” Now he’s curious.
We then have to reboot the gateway and come up…tech-directed, as they do various things from THEIR end. No joy. We go from THEIR phone, which is out, to my new TracFone, which uses up 3 hours of its talk-time as TechGuy and Jane try various fixes, and finally end up with something I’m not quite sure of, but it doesn’t involve our LinkSys router, but some feature of the (second) shiny new gateway they sent us, which is linked to the Cisco modem…God help us, it works. We got internet. It’s not wholly optimum, SFAIK, but it works.
At this point, 3 hours down on my pay-to-talk phone and with the rest of our day trashed, we ordered pizza. We will re-diet tomorrow.
Definitely Pizza. Which, of course, requires a phone.
Pardon me for asking a silly question. When you first couldn’t find Jane, why didn’t you call her cell? I do this with DH all the time because he’s liable to be anywhere at all and not where I expected. And because he’s deaf he can’t hear me yelling. And sometimes I find he’s in the back bathroom, far away from the driveway.
Errm, he’s deaf so you phone him? 😉
Yes, he is permanently attached to his cell and he can hear it and/or feel it. It’s the best way of contacting him if he’s not visible. His cell (and all other phones in the house) are on the speaker.
The problem is if he hasn’t put his blankety blank hearing aids in.
Cell phones on vibrate work for deaf people too, and as long as you can get their attention, texting. My father and my boss at work both need hearing aids, and half the time, they don’t work anyhow.
His hearing aids work – as long as he wears them. He has a “brick” for a phone and refuses to text. When the “brick” dies it’s going to be painful trying to find another phone that he can actually hear. Every so often we try some out but haven’t found one that works as well as his old one.
Actually neither Jane nor I stay tightly attached to our cells. Both purses live in the kitchen, and we have one actually functional car, as opposed to the one that needs a battery charge, and neither of us tends to answer our cell phones, or ever to think of having one with us: just the purses and keys, if going out. We have no neighbors that we tend to visit, except Joan, and she’s 3 blocks from here. So if Jane wasn’t answering it was fairly well a bet she was in the basement, or in the back yard, or circled around to reach the garage as I went around front…or there was something wrong. Instead—I booomfed her with the back door as I burst through it, right in mid snap of the guys working on the line.
It’s always sumthin’! But power outages really blow creative concentration! Pizza is a fine solution!
We came home from shopping and errands to find the electricity out. Some genius had taken out a pole at the foot of the hill and this time the power company actually opted for a new pole instead of coming up with one of their ‘temporary’ fixes. Wires draped on tree trunks; pole cut off three feet above the ground sistered into a planted one….things get very strange around here. Fortunately the power came on within an hour and we could keep our pizza warm!
Stay warm and out of the waves!
What does pizza celebrate? I think you deserve it!
Pizza inspired me — homemade cheese pizza with whole wheat crust.
I get inspired by the half-price veggies at the market. Last weekend, fajita mix (sweet peppers and, IMO, too much onion) and mushrooms. Good for a veggie pizza, with a little cheese on it. I bought enough for two, so I have frozen cooked veggies for the next pizza.
Several years back, we had a storm which took out most of the power in our end of town. Neighborhoods slowly were restored, but three days later, power on our block still wasn’t up. DH called the electric company and asked when we could expect to have power back, since everyone else was on again, and the power company said, “You mean you’re not back yet? We turned on everything in that area yesterday.” There was some frantic scuttling about and line trucks darting hither and yon, and by the end of the day we did have our electricity back.
Some time later, a garden center truck moving trees took a side route up our street to dodge flooding. Our cable runs from the bottom of one of those drapes of wire between poles up to our house, and has been the repeated target of oversized vehicles. Despite DH trying to wave them off, the truck insisted on plowing on and through the cable, snapping it at the splice. The only good thing is that 2 cars back a police vehicle was following the cavalcade, and immediately pulled the truck over and cited them.
Errm, you come back from shopping, they’re still working, and you “ring the bell”? Battery backup? 😉
My power went out a couple months ago, so I went to my sister’s. I escaped by pulling a foot-long rope with a T-handle dangling from the slider on the opener’s track. That releases the “dog” connected to the door, and with the springs carrying most of the weight I raised the door by hand. There is an adjustment that should be made, because dropping the door closed didn’t re-engage the dog. So I braced an old broom handle from one of the cross-braces to the ceiling to keep it from opening. When I got home power was on, so I removed the broom-handle, powered the opener through a cycle, which did engage the dog and all is well. 🙂
We don’t have a wired doorbell. The Christmas, a friend gave us a gag gift — one of the intercom panels from Star Trek — but it turned out to be useful. It has the ‘entry’ chime, and a motion sensor that makes the door opening swoosh. It’s kind of nice because the swoosh is loud enough, and the motion sensor extends out far enough, that we know someone is coming to the door before they actually round the corner from the carport.
We have a wireless doorbell. Not only that, you can buy extra buzzers for other places and set each one to a separate tone. Garage is Windsor Chimes; that means ‘come help me out here.’ The front buzzer is standard ding-dong. That means ‘front door’, usually ‘mail.’ I’m thinking I’d like a third one for the basement. The only drawback to this is that when the thermometer hits below zero, the garage sounds off at odd hours.
The wireless doorbell is Nutone, and I strongly recommend these if you have an aging doorbell you’ve been threatening to replace. We merely hung the new unit over the hole (and wires) for the predecessor.
Oh….I have to look into this. If I’m downstairs, I can’t hear the doorbell ring (which is located mid-house….house is a split level).
Sounds like liberal application of Scotch was also called for. Boy can I sympathize! My cellphone id also a pay-as-you go which lives in my purse and usually gets turned on only when I need to use it. For over a month last summer I was fighting with the help desk folks for our work network. I’m in an office trailers ways from the main building and our system when down. Only in the trailer. And some Morin at the Washington Office several years ago decided to tie the phones to the computers — so in an area that’s second to Florida for lightning strikes, if the computer doesn’t work neither does the phone. One day mine didn’t and neither did the rest of the building. So I used my cell for hours over days and days being told the network is up (not in my trailer it wasn’t), and someone at a higher level will call back at my desk number (really? Hoe is that gonna happen since you know I have no computer) and you’ll hsve to to X and Z which involves electrical things and network configurations tor an office complex scattered over acres. I said bullshit to the last part — I haven’t the faintest clue about electrical and phone boards. We still have problems with the whole system crashing intermittently and no one willing to look at the building’s wiring — a trsngormet kn a nearby pole had herb hit befote
muttermuttermutter.touchscreens. Anyway a transformer on a nearby pole was hit several years ago and fried every computer, phone, and electronic piece of whatever in the building and it took a month to get folk functional again. They’re confined it was hit again back in July, but refuse to to more that replace this big routers and a switch at a junction box. I went through about 12hours on my cell, which is about what I go through in a whole year. Liberal applications of Scotch did happen during numerous afternoons at home.
I think I would have been just a bit less than warm and friendly with the Avista Power guy. How long have you been planning to replace the transformer? Why are you giving me less than XX minutes notice so that I can go through the house and unplug the critical electronics, etc., etc.?
Now, I know they’ll be unsympathetic and say, “We’re just here to replace the transformer, you’ll have to call the office if you want the answers to your questions.” Times like that when they know they have you over the proverbial barrel and there isn’t a thing you can do about it, because the longer you stand there and complain, the less time you’ll have to get your house prepared for the outage. If you stand there long enough, they’ll pull the plug anyway, no matter what you say.
What if one or both of you were on critical life support systems, wanna bet how fast they’d have to backtrack? It bothers me that sometimes they think that poor planning on their part or poor communication on their part somehow constitutes an emergency on my part. I’d be furious if they did that to my parents, since my mother is on oxygen, and even though she could go to the portable unit, that is not the point and they don’t need to know she has one. Of course, if you’re on their “list” of critical needs customers, then they are supposed to be more accommodating. Maybe they are, I have never run across the situation.
I know that some of the maps I saw at work had notes about advance notification to a customer – and that was a gas company. A power company should try, at least for non-emergency work.