Cooking by Gas
Now I’m hopped up on 10mbps cable, the old US Robotics CMX cable modem finally reached the end of its useful life. Not least, the 10BaseT connection would saturate before t’internet gave up all its goodness. So, two days ago it was time to ask NTL for a new modem. Twenty minutes on hold and a transfer to the wrong department later, an appointment was arranged for today.
A shiny new modem arrived today, with a very cheery engineer who gave a few choice little bits of insider information that will no doubt turn out to be handy (nothing dodgy, just stuff you wouldn’t necessarily guess). One ten minute call to customer services and I had my PIN for registration. A slight snag where the registration CD software assumes that you are upgrading from dialup. Do you want to keep your old dialup ID? No? Then you must want an entirely new account.
One more call to customer services (10 mins) and it was established that I needed to talk to broadband tech support. Fair enough. They picked up almost immediately, and told me the best thing to do was to register a new, temporary ID, and then call them back after 2-3 hours when it was fully established in order to get my old mailbox etc. transferred over into my original ID. They gave me a ticket reference number to give when I called back. After 3 hours I called back (again, very little wait time), gave the ticket number, and after a little bit of re-explaining, the transfer was done. All is now peachy.
So, it was hardly painless, but I have to say that apart from one hiccough, it’s been handled pretty well. And now I have a speedy pipe! So to speak. Of course now I’m not bitching about my connection, but the failings of the servers, the network in general, latency, and the price of fish. Oh well. Speaking of fish, thank you Rick Stein for your Ragout of Turbot and Scallops with Vouvray and Basil. Omega 3licious!