Cut Off From the Internet!

Our home internet and email connection is finally back after being completely down for one full week. While it really wasn’t a life-or-death situation, it was painful not being able to use my email, look at my bank account balance, pay bills on-line, or surf the web for information.

The first thing I did was to contact the customer support department at Earthlink, my internet provider. I went through the whole bit, describing everything to the Indian guy on the phone, checking this, typing that, until he finally came to the conclusion that my cable connection was out and that I needed to contact the Time Warner service department. This, however, was not so easy. Every call I made to Time Warner was transferred via their automated phone system back to Earthlink. I tried various combinations of menu selections, yet always got back to Earthlink.

The second day, almost by accident, I managed to connect to a recording that confirmed there were some service outages affecting internet access, they were aware of the situation, and they were working on it. Well, that was something, anyway. But the next day, the recording was gone and I still had no service. Did this mean they thought it was fixed? I wanted to talk to someone!

Day four, after continuing to punch through all possible combinations of menu options, I managed to connect to a live person in the service department! He confirmed that there was a service outage that covered a large area of Southern California. He assured me that I should be back on-line by the next day. But I was not back on-line the next day, or the day after.

By the seventh day, I was determined to either get the problem fixed or kill someone. I first talked to Time Warner, and they informed me that the service outage was no longer an issue, that my cable and modem both worked, and that I must contact Earthlink again. Earthlink once again took me through their trouble-shooting script and this time decided it was a Microsoft issue! I had been receiving an automatic update program from Microsoft which failed to load several times. Earthlink believed that this could be the reason for my problem.

Microsoft said they could fix my problem, but would have to charge me. Okay, by that time I thought it was worth it! After over an hour of trouble shooting with the Microsoft Indian guy, the final solution was to do a system restore back to a week ago, before I lost internet access. We also disabled the automated Microsoft updates, which apparently aren’t compatible with my computer for some reason. Well, it worked.

Perhaps I should have known to do a system restore without having to pay for a service call. I’ll know next time. But I hope there is no next time. Dreamer!