So yesterday we finally got hi-speed internet for the apartment. Joy. But it certainly wasn’t without its hassles.
First, we ordered it last week and never got a tracking number for the modem. Since our service was confirmed to be activated yesterday, I started looking at my account over the weekend to see if I could find out what was wrong. I finally realized monday night that for some reason the shipping address, which I’m pretty sure I specified as being the same as the billing address, only had our apartment number and not the street address. I called AT&T tuesday to see what could be done, and see if they had a tracking number for me. Lo and behold it was wrong there too, and of course they had already shipped it (which is good, I suppose, but don’t you think someone would have noticed that it had no street number?)

The lady at AT&T (who was very nice, but I don’t remember her name) actually called UPS while I was on the phone with her, and the not-so-nice lady there said there was nothing to be done about it at that moment, I would have to call the next day (when it was to be delivered) and change it with the delivery person. Sigh. So I wake myself up early and call the UPS distribution office and (of course) the package is already out for delivery and has been since 4:30 in the morning (according to the tracking number that the AT&T lady nicely provided). I explain my story over again, and *this* woman says I’ll have to wait until there’s one attempted delivery before they can change it. You might have noticed by now that I am NOT a morning person. And I was already annoyed that the whole thing had gone wonky, so I tried to be nice as I pointed out, “It has NO ADDRESS. How can it be ATTEMPTED if there is NO ADDRESS to deliver to?” “Oh, we have to check with the sender and see if they have it wrong.” “The sender knows it’s wrong. You know it’s wrong. I know it’s wrong. Why can’t we change it today? The service is coming on today, and I don’t want to pay for a day of service that I can’t use because you won’t try to change the address.” “Oh, alright, I’ll call AT&T and make sure this is right, and I’ll attempt to call the deliveryperson.”
Sigh. Thank goodness. They were supposed to call me at work to confirm that it was going to the right place, but they didn’t, of course. I eventually called back to check, and lo and behold, it had arrived! The UPS guy must have thought my roommate was very popular since she had gotten packages (for me, natch) two days in a row.
So. We got the modem. Try to set it up, but the unhelpful folder containing the setup cd doesn’t mention the fact that registration won’t go through unless your default browser is Internet Exploder (misspelling intended), which both I and the roommate, owning Macs, don’t use. So we called AT&T, who was helpful and led us to the setup page (in IE, boo) so we could finish. Why couldn’t the folder say, This registration requires IE. If you cannot use IE, please point your browser to…. Would have saved us a lot of trouble.
Okay! Fast internet, as long as you’re plugged in. My roommate had a wireless router from her previous apartment, and it had been working, with a small snafu: the setup page was in Italian. Since neither of us speak more Italian than Ciao you can see how this would be a problem. I might have gone for the internet search route first, but my roomie called Linksys, and after about 15 minutes of trying to explain our problem to the tech guy from India (who was obviously just reading off a sheet) it finally got through to him that a) our setup page was in Italian and therefore we had no idea which button to click and b) we were using Macs which technically aren’t supported by Linksys (which is stupid, because the setup is EXACTLY THE SAME, just with a different OS look)…
The guy goes, “The setup page is in Italian?”
Us: “Yes, that’s what we’ve been saying.”
(Pause. A really long pause)
Him: “JESUS CHRIST!”
Which we both found hilarious. We totally stumped the tech guy, AND made him curse. So eventually we figure out which buttons to press, and we rename the router and configure it. Lo and behold, there is a wireless network! I can connect to it! So can anyone else! Therefore we must change the password.
He wanted us to use our phone number, which we both thought was silly, so we started thinking up combinations of our name and other numbers, etc, and they didn’t work. He just kept telling us to use the phone number. Finally we got an error saying it needed a hex code or something, so I asked, “oh, does it have to be numeric?” And he said yes, as if he had been saying that all along, which he hadn’t. What would have been so hard about saying, “use your phone # or other numeric code”? Sigh. We ended up using the phone number because we knew we could change it later.
BUT…
Somewhere between renaming the router and changing the password, it all went away. And we couldn’t get it back. The guy kept telling us to go to the website and download things, which we couldn’t do since everything was messed up. It ended with my roomie hanging up on the guy, unfortunately, and the router won’t work now. I tried to reflash the firmware, but I don’t think it went through. Ugh.
(ETA: one week later) The kicker of this is that there have been wireless networks floating around the apartment for years. It seems that there is at least one other Linksys router out there, and I think, somehow, we managed to change the settings on THAT router and not our own. I think this, because long after the router was disconnected to anything remotely resembling power or internet, the network we had named was still out there, but unconnectable. And to make it even more fun, one time when I was DIRECTLY connected to our router, the setup page connected us to somone else’s router!
(ETA: October 1, 2006) Roomie had friends in town for her birthday, and the guy said the router was probably dead. Sigh. Roomie might try to get a refund since it’s not that old, but I don’t hold out much hope. I guess we can try getting another one on eBay or sth, because it’s rather annoying to know that I could have gotten the network adaptor package and theoretically this wouldn’t have happened. we didn’t get it because she had the router…hopefully we can get it fixed soon.
And if you managed to read all that, have a cookie.