Tragedy

Yes, it is with a heavy heart that I must announce some really horrible news that befell me recently..

I have not had an Internet connection at my apartment since Thursday! Yes, it is probably one of the worst things that could happen, and I’m starting to wonder if I shouldn’t have been so greedy. You see, I asked my landlady to increase the Internet speed from 1.5 Mbps to 5Mbps. It was working fine, I had Internet, I had wireless, I had my Vonage phone, but it just seemed like it could be faster. So, on Thursday, I was supposed to be switched over. Obviously, that did not go as planned. Something happened that completely knocked my DSL line out!

Now, the landlady is very nice, but she does not speak English, nor has she ever used a computer, but on Friday, she and her friend spent all morning on the phone with Arnet trying to get the service back up.  No luck. She came back with her friend on Saturday. Again, no luck.  Now, I’m very technical, but not speaking Spanish has put me at a severe disadvantage since I could not explain much to her or Arnet. The other problem is that the representatives at Arnet will try a few things and when those do not work, simply say they have to call you back. Of course, they never do. There seems to be no way to get to a higher level of support, or even get a manager on the phone, and they don’t seem to be very concerned that you don’t have any Internet either. Don’t they know that this blog has to be updated?!?!?

This morning, after begging our Spanish teacher to come over, we again called Arnet – translator and me. We tried with the first rep. No luck. She said she would call back at 8pm. Right.  Marco decided to call again. This time we got someone else. Again, no luck. BUT, he did say that the problem was on Arnet’s side and it was related to a problem with the speed upgrade from last week. Aghhh! Well, at least we know knew what the problem was. When would it be fixed? Well, that seems to be another story entirely as he could not give us a date or time that it would be back up and running. We had to hang up and try again tomorrow. Marco explained to me that this is how things work in Buenos Aires. I guess I have no choice but to accept it… So, we’ll try again tomorrow.

I do have to thank my friendly neighbor (whoever they may be), I’ll just call them “Señor Dlink.”  They are the only ones with an open wireless router that has been feeding my addiction… I have my laptop set up as a router, plugged into my Vonage phone and giving my desktop PC Internet access as well. Señor Dlink, I’m trying not to use too much of your bandwidth, I promise. Please don’t decide to password protect your wireless Internet like all the other neighbors.  And, if I ever find out who you are, I owe you dinner…

Oh yeah, and to make matters worse – Gmail is down too! And Craigslist was down yesterday!  What is this world coming to?

UPDATE (8.13.08): My Internet access was finally restored today! All is once again good.