Milage may vary...

Blah

So, it's sometimes not enough that I have to deal with the craziness of my work, but sometimes it follows me home

I got home last night, cooked a little dinner, did some laundry, cleaned up a bit, and then headed to the computer room for a nice bit of WoW. Beer in hand I settled in only to find my internet connection deader than a doornail. My ADSL modem has been acting up for the past couple of months, so I figured a quick restart and everything would be back to normal. No such luck, I tried for about 15 minutes making sure all the connections were good, everything was how it was supposed to be.

Nothing...

>.<

So, I call SBC tech support. Whoever decided that customers would much rather talk to a computer instead making the selections themselves needs to be shot...

Repeatedly...

After finally getting an actual human, I tell them my problem. I get to go through the usual "blah blah is it plugged in? blah blah is the cord plugged in? blah blah are the lights in the front on? blah blah blah". We go through this for about 15 minutes before the guys decides they're going to have to send someone out to take a look at my lines. I'd been trying to broach the topic of maybe my model is bad (go figure) because it's around 5 years old. The lady at the other end goes "Well, that certainly could be. You should probably go out and get a new one." I asked why I should have to buy it since is was part of their service to which I was informed "Well, after the first year warranty, you own the modem. Any replacement would need to be purchased by you.". I found that highly interesting as I pay $5.95 a month for equipment rental. They had no response for this. After going back and forth for a bit, I finally told them to come out and check the lines and we'd take it from there. By this point I was pretty pissed off. I fumed for a bit and then the phone rang. "Uh, Sir, well, you see, it's like this... umm, the connection server in your area was offline for a moment, but it's back up and running now. If you go and check, you should have a connection. Sorry for the inconvenience." I was still not happy.

SBC has been on my bad side for some time due to a recent issue that has come up with my Dish service. I recently bought a HDTV and wanted to upgrade my service. However, according to them, I can't upgrade because I already have service.

WTF...

I've at them for over a month and I think I've talked to everyone except the CEO of AT&T. It's just so stupid. These large conglomerate companies today could give less than a shit about their customers. I remember back, and it wasn't really that long ago, that companies had some pride in taking care of customers. Now, we're all just a number and a dollar sign and if they lose one or two of us, there's 10 to take our places because there are so few options. I ask you why the hell we spent so much money breaking up MaBell only now to have it reform under AT&T? Why the hell does our government let things like this happen? Shit, that was a dumb question, don't answer that...

So anyway, I finally get online and head off with the raid. We did pretty good all and all. There we're a couple of fights that got a little out of control because people are too quick off the gun with damage, but easily recovered. The biggest enemy we had though, and it's something there's no strategy for, was the lag. I was averaging between 350-500ms most of the evening. The worst thing that happened was the during the boss fight, we had this fool down to 10% in a perfect textbook fight when everything froze. About ten seconds later, I was suddenly very dead along with the rest of the raid. Looking up, my lag was 2200ms. I know Blizzard has a lot going, I know there's a lot of new things that are coming, and I know they can't respond to everything really quickly. However, apparently this has been going on for some time and it's still not fixed. If you look in the technical support forum on Blizzards site, Blackhand has it's own 20 page topic that's been bumped up to the top for the last month. The content we're facing is hard enough as it is, we don't need any extra help from the servers.

posted by Dave @ 6:47 AM