Tag: Time Warner Cable

Haunted computers

SOMETHING is emanating from our house that risked disconnecting not just our service, but the service of a dozen and a half other customers in our neighborhood.

inexplicable
My friend Broome posted the xkcd cartoon above on his Facebook page. He explained that his astonishingly patient wife is “the only one who believes me when I say I experience certain things, people and places differently, like this great restaurant that always serves me uneatable food,…or haunted computers…or…”

I totally relate. At work, I have my computer switched out more often than anyone. I used to believe that I had some sort of electromagnetism that wore down the functionality of electronic devices.

I got an Android tablet from work a few years ago, but in a few months, it stopped working. I bought another one, and it lasted just as long before refusing to charge. My current Amazon Fire is operable so far, knock my forehead.

And it’s not just me, it’s my house.

As I’ve noted, I’ll walk down the street talking on my cellphone fine – assuming it doesn’t read “Low Battery,” which it often does, even when I hadn’t turned it on. Walking into the house, the signal nearly dies. This is a problem when I’m calling Time Warner Cable to report the Internet and phone is out.

Two weeks after I contacted the company, a TWC repair guy came to our house to fix the service that was no longer in need of repair. The bottom line: remember a couple of weeks ago when I joked that I wondered “whether the outage had anything to do with the TWC truck that was in front of our house just before the service went down”? Well, it DID!

Apparently, SOMETHING is emanating from our house that risked disconnecting not just our service, but the service of a dozen and a half other customers in our neighborhood. It could have been the cable connected to an old TV (not the case) or other factors.

Rather than having all of our neighbors losing service, and them contacting TWC, TWC sent a “repair” person up the utility pole to disconnect OUR service! And didn’t even tell us! The guy at my door arrived to fix the problem, assuming I hadn’t noticed the service had been out for a fortnight.

My house and I break cable services, and Android tablets, and all sorts of electronic devices. I’m not computerphobic; it’s just my electrons mucking up everything.

xkcd is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.

Disconnected

THAT’S why I didn’t read your blogs, or respond to your emails

time-warnerThat recent annoying 23-hour day, I was up early contemplating a blog post. Suddenly, around 8 a.m., the phone went out, as did the Internet. This meant I was feeling disconnected.

Oh, I have the cell phone, but it’s strange: it doesn’t work very well in this house. I can be walking down the street talking to one of my sisters on the phone, walk into my home, and the sound just drops out.

I’ve had enough experience troubleshooting the Time Warner box that I rebooted the who-zee-what’s-it. When it STILL wasn’t working, I called TWC on the aforementioned unreliable-in-my-own-house cellphone. They had no openings until the next day between 3 and 4 p.m.

I COULD have gone to the library, or the local coffeehouse to access my email, but I was tired. And I wanted the opportunity to see how well (or badly) we could operate sans connectivity. We did OK, but I must admit that the youngest of us was a little grumpier than usual not being able to get online.

At the very end of that one-hour window, the TWC guy showed. He had to go out to the street a couple of times, not merely fuss with the device. Within a half-hour, service was restored. My spouse asked, at my urging – I was still at work – whether the outage had anything to do with the TWC truck that was in front of our house just before the service went down. He was unwilling to say, of course, but when the inevitable customer service follow-up robocall came, I was happy to share my theory of the outage.

Anyway, THAT’S why I didn’t read your blogs, or respond to your emails or Facebook comments that day. If you called my landline, it didn’t work. And the world did not end. Still, as soon as I got to work, I quickly perused my 188 emails, all except about a dozen which I quickly deleted.

Shouldn’t no Internet mean NO Internet?

I could access Google itself, though none of the links worked.

Internet.mouseIt was the Saturday afternoon of Memorial Day weekend when I realized that our home Internet was not working. Well, mostly.

The laptop computer would not connect to the Internet, even though the WiFi was clearly working, verified both by the computer itself and the guy on the phone from Time Warner Cable. Later, I saw that my wife’s Apple device had no Internet connection either.

So the problem is probably in the router, though I rebooted it at least thrice. Plugging it directly into the computer did not help.

But wait: this is weird. Operating the laptop, in Google Chrome (but NOT in Internet Explorer), I COULD get to an array of Google products. I could access Google itself, though none of the links worked. I could visit Google+, Google maps. My old blog, and others I write, are powered by Blogger, and I could compose blogs in Blogger, but I couldn’t preview them; I could even publish them, but I couldn’t read them to check for errors.

I commiserated with a bunch of my Internet buddies. Sunday afternoon, I took the laptop and iPad to the library, which was still closed, but I thought sitting outside, maybe I could access the signal; no go. Went to a local Internet cafe, and neither worked; ditto the closed bagel shop.

Back at home, the Google miracle no longer worked, and I had no Internet at all.

The guy from TWC arrived on time at 11 a.m. on Tuesday morning. It wasn’t theft of services or some other nefarious ploy. The short explanation is that he thinks that my router just wore out, and he replaced it. He also gave us a new cable remote that actually worked; previously we needed to use the TV’s remote to turn it on and off, and the cable remote to change channels and watch the DVR.

This explains why I was slow in answering emails, and visiting blogs, including for ABC Wednesday, last week. It also made my inclination to write ahead in my blog a good one, because I burned through six posts catching up with other things before I could write a new post, that being this one.

And the Google miracle STILL defies explanation.

Social media & sharing icons powered by UltimatelySocial