Blog Number 229

Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.

Man, another day, another one of those meetings.  Thursdays are brutal anyway but the meeting I am in now it especially merciless in its viciousness.

I will let everyone know that I signed up for a phone line and DSL service yesterday with AT&T.  The house I am leasing is so new that the automated system on their site does not even recognize my address.  As such, I cannot use the online form to request new service.  Because of that, I have to pay the full price since the specials only apply if you use the online system.  Another added touch (along with the activation fees) of dealing with a live human when requesting new service is that they try to talk you into other services that I don't want.  Ultimately I had the same conversation that I had about this time last year when all I wanted was the basest phone service that would allow me to use the DSL service.  After much discussion (mostly on the part of the AT&T person) I was able to convince them to sign me up for their $4.20 / month phone service allowing me 25 local calls per month since I made a grand total of one phone call in the 13 months I had this service in my apartment.  Doing the math, the one phone call that I made cost me about $50.  I made this point ad nausea to the phone rep when they kept trying to talk me into a higher costing service.  Once that was solved, a discussion ensued about the speed of internet access that I would need.  I wanted the $20 / month service (even though there was a higher speed available for $5 more - a point that the rep made no less than a half dozen times).  Just when I thought I was done with the call, they once again tried to sell me caller ID, call waiting, etc. on my phone line that I previously mentioned (several times) that I would never use.

Anyway, I got through that call (who would have thought that a deterrent to having phone / DSL service would be dreading the call to sign up?) and I should have service soon.  This will allow me to get back to regular blogging and also allow my wife to get email again (something she was only able to do once a week when she went to the library).

Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts.

Jon