Weekend Issues

So my DSL is screwed up and we had snow- one good and one bad event...

I noticed on Wednesday that my DSL was going at about 1/2 speed that it normally was- about 3Mbps instead of 6Mbps.  I also noticed that if I rebooted the router it was taking several minutes to re-sync and get back online. 

I called BellSouth on Friday from work- bad mistake; they can only trouble-shoot if you are at the residence.  Basically they have you connect to speed.fastaccess.com and see what results you get- if you have a bad connection they cycle the sync, get you to reboot your modem and do a little song and dance.  None of this helped so they scheduled a technician to come out and take a look at it- on the next morning between 8am and 12am (!!!). 

The technician arrived and checked my line with a little DSL computer; he verified that I was having some kind of issues and he was going to check the box and may have to escalate to the line support group.  I gave him my cell phone and didn't hear back from him (he did a test call to my cell phone to put the number in his phone, but I never saw a missed call- I think he mistyped my number!)

Currently I have only about 2Mbps - 2.5Mbps connectivity and I am really hoping that they will get this resolved on Monday.  I am kind of betting that someone else in the neighborhood ordered DSL this week and my connection was 'bumped' while installing the other circuit (this happened a few years ago but at that time I had a total loss of sync). If this is the case then it is way too easy for a minimum wage technician to make a mistake and not realize that there is an issue with another customer (my early rant- I will retract if it is something else)

Another reason that I may not have heard back from the tech is that it started snowing about 30 minutes after he left my house.  The snow lasted for about 4-5 hours in central Atlanta, but some areas had more than I did.

For this reason (and the fact that wind chills were expected to be in the single digits) the weekend maintenance (Sunday 1am - 7am) that I was scheduled for was canceled (yay!).   So everything can be taken from perspective; the snow was bad as it may have kept everyone home and ruined the weekend, but it was good as it saved my weekend.

I was way to tired to go on on Sunday- I had been up until 5am on Saturday (and back up again at 9:00am when the technician arrived) playing Warhammer Dawn of War : The Dark Crusade (Awesome game!)  I was playing a warez copy, but I picked up a platinum edition today with the original dawn of war/dark crusade/winter assault at BestBuy for $30 today (with my new room fridge).