Technology Woes

A lot of things aren’t working in my life right now, technology-wise, since I took on my new job and arrived in New York. I’m so utterly frustrated right now that I’m tempted to high-tail it back to an area of the country where I was comfortable knowing that technology was working for me - not slowly but surely driving me insane.

My new job required I get a cell phone. Gad. I finally had to break down and take the wireless plunge. I hate my phone. It broke down after the first month and had to be replaced. AT&T charged me for the replacement phone they sent me. They promised to reimburse me upon receiving the bad phone, which I shipped to them immediately. Unfortunately, they didn’t get the reimbursement amount right, and shorted me quite a bit of money. It took me 12 weeks and five different phone calls before AT&T properly reimbursed me for the phone I returned to them.

That was before I moved across the street to the Gershwin in January. My cell phone doesn’t work any better in this apartment than it did across the street. The reception is terrible. After over a half dozen lengthy calls to AT&T (now Cingular), I’m still stuck in a year-long contract with a phone I can’t use in my home office. Seeing as how I’m a field employee, my main method of customer and work contact is via cellular phone and Internet. When either of those goes down, I lose productivity. So I’m paying about 80 bucks a month for cellular service that doesn’t work the majority of the time I’m at work.

Why not switch carriers? Because Cingular will charge me $175 to release me from the contract. I refuse to pay this amount and have adamantly told them that I’m not paying $175 for a service that does not work. My employer refuses to pay. Somebody needs to pay. I haven’t met that person yet. If you see that person, please have him or her send up a flare to contact me.

Today, on my second call of the day to Cingular to escalate this issue, the representative I was speaking to attempted to transfer me to the “resolution” group, and I got disconnected during the transfer. I gave up for the day. Somehow, I knew he wouldn’t call back. Later I discovered that the rep had in fact called me back - on my cellular phone – the one that I called to tell him DOES NOT WORK.

Each day I find myself repeating, “I am dealing with a bunch of monkeys.” And it only gets worse.

New York is the first city I’ve lived in where my home phone line is supplied by a cable company. When I learned this, it scared me. “What does a cable company know about phones?” I feared the worse. Sure enough, I’ve had a problem with an $8/month service since the day RCN finally hooked up my phone (which was three days later than they promised to – but we won’t even go there).

After nearly four months of lengthy phone calls with RCN customer service, my caller ID still does not work. Each time I call them, I have to go through this lengthy selection menu and then have to tell the entire story about my caller ID not working to whichever rep I get. They always end up transferring me to a troubleshooting technician. And – I kid you not – twice I’ve been disconnected during the transfer and had to call back in, go through the lengthy menu again, and start all over with a different person. I think the people on 10th floor heard my screams that day.

I’ve wasted hours and hours on this problem. I’ve tried four – count them – FOUR different phones, and still my caller ID doesn’t work. I told RCN this valuable piece of troubleshooting information, and still they said that my Caller ID should be working just fine because “it’s turned on on our end.” Ultimately they decided that (maybe) my Uniden phones just aren’t compatible with Caller ID. Hmmm, my Uniden phones worked fine with Comcast Cable, I told them. “Where’s your phone compatibility list? Is it posted on the Web?” I asked Jennifer on the last call. “Um, not anymore.” She was unable to find it but indicated that she’d never heard of Uniden.

That’s when I knew this was a losing battle and I’d have to try another tactic. Today I finally bought a caller ID box at Radio Shack - just for testing purposes. I already knew the end result. Sure enough, my Caller ID still doesn’t work! So, guess who I have to call tomorrow (after I get off the phone with Cingular customer service)? Another couple of hours of my already hectic schedule tomorrow are shot. I’m not sure how much more of this I can take.

Tonight I was online working away. (Have I mentioned that when I’m not fighting with Cingular or RCN, all I do is work?) I went for a walk to buy bananas and a caller ID unit. When I got home, my high-speed Internet connection had gone down. Again, I spent a good hour troubleshooting, trying different computers, different cables, resetting the modem, rebooting the computers – you know, the usual stuff you do when you lose Internet connectivity – and calling my ISP, RCN. After navigating their selection menu, a recorded voice told me that the wait time would be 19 minutes. I knew something was up. When I finally got a technician on the phone, all he could tell me was “Yup, we’re having lots of problems in New York that just started a few minutes ago.” I asked, “So I assume you don’t know the cause and don’t have an ETA?” “That’s right,” he said. I started laughing, “I am having the worst day,” I said jovially. He didn’t find it funny and hung up after some smart-aleck comment which I’ve already forgotten.

On to my new Toshiba Tecra M2 laptop. The system board lasted all of five months, and it’s been downhill from there. I had to leave my laptop with Help Desk for a day so that the system board could be replaced. This required wasting a whole day of productivity setting up a desktop computer at home for VPN connectivity (etcetera) so that I could continue to do my job.

When I got my laptop back, it was no longer my laptop. They'd replaced the shell with another Toshiba laptop case that someone had obviously pulled out of a recycle bin somewhere in Redmond. The case looked like it had been taken on a Mt. Rainier climbing trip and dropped repeatedly down the side of the mountain.

This really pissed me off. My team pays for me to get a brand new laptop, and when it breaks down, it gets replaced with a piece of junk? Not acceptable. Especially since I work in financial services in NYC. If my client was KOA Kampground, no big deal. But I sit down in meetings with managing directors of a large Wall Street brokerage firm - I don't want them thinking that I dragged my laptop across the subway platform on my way into the office.

So, when surveyed, I complained. A manager called me and promised me they'd track down my old laptop shell, replace the system board, and send it to NY for me. Today was my appointment to have the shell replaced. I walked six blocks in pouring rain to drop off my laptop at Help Desk late yesterday afternoon, hoping they could jump on it first thing this morning. By noon today they still didn't have an ETA. It was 12:30 when they realized that my old case had never arrived from Redmond.

Of course, this was on a day when my customer had a critsit (a critical technical situation) that I had to manage. Not to mention, I'd put a consultant on site for another urgent issue awaiting resolution. I couldn't go on site without a laptop, so I worked remotely on both issues most the day, only to find out I could have gone in to the client's office after all if only the Help Desk had checked their shipment.

So tomorrow I have to go without my laptop, once again, while they restore it to its original condition.

For the month of April, my laptop has been down more than it’s been up. And I'm pretty sure I've now spent more hours on the phone with my company’s internal Help Desk than I have spent sleeping since I got to NY. The sad thing about all of this is that the technicians I’ve worked with lately have only made my computer problems worse. There’s nothing more frustrating than calling someone for help and finding out you know more than they do about the technology you’re calling them for help about.

One day I called in to get help with a Windows Installer problem – a minor software glitch that was keeping me from installing the latest and greatest internal VPN connection software that allows me to do my job anywhere that has an Internet connection – i.e., at my home office and the client’s site, the two places where I usually work. I’d actually found my own workaround to install the software but needed to fix the problem long-term. I was on the phone with Help Desk for two hours straight that day, and by the end of the call, my entire operating system had been replaced, and I’d lost all service packs and security updates that had been released since Windows XP came out. Somehow, I'd allowed the technician to convince me that running "repair" on my Windows OS would not replace newer files. I was reluctant, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt. Never again.

On the survey I received and filled out later, I said I was never calling Help Desk again after this experience (and others of late). A nice manager called me back and convinced me not to take such drastic measures. A couple days later, I called back into Help Desk to say that my VPN connection kept dropping. That was April 11th, my 41st birthday. After 90 minutes on the phone with this other technician, I could no longer get on the VPN at all. My productivity, once again, was shot because I was in worse shape than I'd been in prior to calling Help Desk. I spent yet another day repairing my computer after allowing a technician to hose it up.

Really, never again. I mean it this time.

When people ask me what I did for my 41st birthday and I tell them that I spent it crying, they don't understand that it was a combination of technology and idiocy that had me in tears, not a mid-life crisis.

To this day, that ticket is still open, has been escalated, and no one has solved the problem with my VPN connection dropping. I even managed to narrow it down to my laptop and provide trace logs to the technicians. Unfortunately, the escalation engineer is still trying to figure out how to read the IP address from my IPCONFIG.

So I give up.