Paul's Comments

For the last 5 or 6 days I've been running "Prisoner Exercise" class Internet Service from Verizon Online. This is because generally the service will come on for maybe one hour a day and be out the other 23. (This is how people in prison are allowed out for exercise.) Another way to put it is to again announce that my Internet Connectivity is currently provided by Baghdad Electric Power Company.

I have a post I'll do later about my complaint to the Maryland Public Service Commission about getting (or rather, trying to get) discounted phone service. Problem is I probably can't stay connected long enough to post it considering what happened before just with this one.

Right now it's on after coming on yesterday and going out at 3PM exactly one minute before I was going to finish a transaction to add more minutes to my cell phone! I wanted to buy a $19.95 Tracfone card at the CVS at the Eastern Market Metro station, but, as usual, they were out of them. I wanted to take an extra one from another CVS which has them, but even though they have zero value until purchased they wouldn't let me have a spare one so that the next time I needed one at the store that is always out of them, I'd have it. Well, as it turned out, I got a better deal on-line; buy the 60 minutes plus an additional 90 days of airtime for $19.99, add an additional 60 minutes for $10. And since, when I bought the phone over a year ago I paid the extra $49.95 then so I get double minutes, so for $29.99 plus about $1.95 tax I got 240 minutes (and 90 days more service time), which is just barely above 10c a minute including the monthly service charge. Or I can just say I pay 11c a minute net. (You can see where I'm a really messy cheapskate here!)

But I had to have Internet connectivity to do it.

Well, anyway, back to my rant story. I was having trouble viewing a video on Tracfone's website, so I went over to a speed testing site, and for a connection to Washington, DC - a total of at most, 12 miles to the farthest point along a diagonal (I am roughly less than one mile from the nearest point to Washington, DC; if I could walk it's only about 6 blocks to the Capital Heights Metro Station which is across the street from the Maryland State Line) I am getting 137K bits per second for download speed and 132K for upload! This is ridiculous. [Note: I ran it a few minutes later, got 135K up/132 down].

Well, it's either today or tomorrow, but a technician is coming out to try and fix the problem of the connection either not being on or only staying on an hour at a time each day. (I hope it will be fixed, that is). Now the only question is whether the connection I have will stay up long enough for me to save this page or whether it will drop off before I can do* so.

*I originally ended my posting here, and I realize it's not as funny as I thought it was so I'll finish the sentence. So now I wait, as a prisoner, for the grant of execution. (I already have a stay; Verizon's Internet is out for 23 hours a day, as I stated!). I forgot whether they set my appointment for sometime today or sometime tomorrow. I think I'll scam the hearing-impaired service to call them (by using my computer) and check instead of spending my cell minutes on an 800 number call. [Update 12/26/2008]Note to myself: Uh, Paul, exactly how do you 'scam' the hearing impaired service to call someone (so you don't have to pay for the call) when you don't have Internet connectivity to connect to the hearing impaired service over the Internet?[End Update]

The last call to Verizon Online ran up 27 minutes of talk time to get a technical person to take a trouble ticket and discover they can't fix whatever is wrong in the office.

I can't simply call using my (unlimited calling) MagicJack phone service because I knocked the UPS off-line again the other day when reorganizing my room and couldn't get the plug back into the wall in time to save the power (as I said, the battery is low so I only have about 2 minutes of save time), so the new Vista computer (HP ST3220N) was shut off, and, as usual, doesn't work because I can't seem to get it to start up again. (Magicjack still won't work with the XP machine I'm using right now to post this message.) Looks like I'm going to eventually have to spend money to get whatever is wrong fixed. But at least, now that I know it makes no difference as far as the switch is concerned, I have the front face plate back on 3220.

Until I have 24 hours continuous, uninterrupted connectivity with Verizon Online I'm not canceling the technician call if it is for tomorrow. If the technician gets here and it's working again I'll point out that it wasn't before.

If I was paranoid I'd say Verizon Online was (1) punishing me for filing a complaint with the Maryland PSC; (2) running the service for perhaps 1 hour a day so they can claim the service is not totally dead and thus I'm still liable if I terminate the service; (3) doing this intentionally. But it is wierd that the service is now mostly off instead of being flakily failing for some amount of time each day.

I noticed some other sleazy little item; in the (printed) terms and conditions for the service (that come after you order it) they claim that if you're going to sue them you agree that you have to do so in Fairfax County, Virginia. Cute trick. It might be arguable that only applies if one is suing over the quality of service as opposed to fighting the billing of the termination charge. Or that it's reprehensibly onerous to impose such a condition over a minor issue. Off the top of my head I can't remember the term lawyers use where a contract term is so manifestly unfair as to be on-its face unreasonable. Oh yeah, unconscionable.

Maybe I should just complain and try to get it waived rather than sue. But I'm just mad enough to do it since it probably won't cost me anything and I can make Verizon have to spend money over the issue even if - or especially if - I force them to re-litigate the issue if they win on the provision requiring someone to sue them in Fairfax County. So they'd end up having to defend the case twice, over a $79 termination fee.

But that whole issue would only come up if I decide to cancel the service, possibly because I want to try and get it added to discount phone service.

In the mean time I need to write a program to monitor my connection, basically pinging a known good site - like Google or Verizon's WWW22 website - once a minute to show that the connection doesn't work. (Perhaps also pinging my firewall or the DSL modem to show the problem is not in any of my equipment.) That way I can show the connection is dead almost all the time if I do have to go into court over the service effectively not being provided at all vs. being so slow as to almost be as bad as dialup. So I need to get some IP addresses while my connection is still hot.

For the record, I found something interesting. I got two addresses for www.google.com: 64.233.169.147 and the more common one 64.233.169.104. Without www it's 74.125.45.100. Verizon.com is 192.76.85.245; pinging that address times out! www.verizon.com is 209.170.110.52 and the infamous www22.verizon.com translates to e3.g.akamaiedge.net (which I knew that Verizon uses Akamai to host their webserver) 72.246.32.29.

I am amazed that at the moment the connection is still hot and hasn't crapped out on me again. Perhaps it's one of those suspicious pathological - if that's the right word - illness type conditions where as soon as you go to a doctor the problem stops; since Verizon is sending a technician out the connection spontaneously improves so when the tech shows up the service works fine. I don't know. But I think I'm going to leave the trouble ticket in place, I can still complain about the really slow connection even if it doesn't die between now and whenever he or she shows up.

I wrote the above around noon, and saved it. Then I wrote the following one paragraph (off line) which was originally part of the previous paragraph:

I do not know if this paragraph will ever be posted; (I probably should have expected it but I hoped the connection would last another 30 seconds) as soon as I wrote this paragraph the connection went belly up and I don't know if it will come back or the connection is out for bad for the day. (It's obviously not out "for good." as this is at least bad if not terrible!) I'm writing this off-line; when the connection returns I will post it.

I am posting this and the following at about 11:40pm when the connection came back up. While I was off-line I did what I was thinking of doing: I wrote a program that logs the connection state by doing a continuous 'ping' of a few public websites once a minute. When it got a connection, it started another program to play a sound. So I'd know to the minute when it came back.

Oh, you might say, it took Verizon's technician from whenever they showed up until now to get it working? No. Verizon's tech never showed up, they never called, and they closed the ticket saying the problem had been fixed without even calling me and without actually fixing the problem.

When 7:30 this evening came by, I called Verizon Online to find out about why the person didn't show up by 7, and got a new trouble ticket and a new appointment, this time for sometime Friday between 8:00 AM and 7:00 PM same as it was supposed to be today. And burned through 41 minutes of cell time. It was a damn good thing I was able to get on line earlier today long enough to buy more minutes, as before I bought an additional 240 today, I only had about 35 left.

With the program I wrote I now knew within one minute when the connection came back up. I have the program running still so I'll know to the minute exactly when it comes crashing down again. The only bad thing about is that it steals focus each minute for about 3 seconds so whenever I'm typing I have to click on this page to get focus back so I can finish.

Well at least there's one nice thing about the service returning the connection is better; as of 12:05AM Thursday I'm getting 447Kbps down, 132K up.

I'm probably going to bug them several times between now and then to verify that my appointment is still good and to let them know I'll be concerned about the technician stiffing me again. I used to think I don't believe in violence but this attitude toward customers makes me understand why some letter carriers have "gone postal."