posted on February 5, 2001 08:43:02 PM new
Actually way worse than nightmares because it happened and is still happening.
We are rural so our options are limited because we need a provider that has local dial-up numbers. I think there are just two companies around here that do.
Our ISP was moving office locations last Friday and emailed their customers that they would be down from about 4:30 PM to 7:00 PM, perhaps a little later if they ran into unforseen problems. It turned into a 2 1/2 day hard outage while they were doing who knows what and they would not answer their phones or open the office doors, presumably, in part anyway, because they didn't want to deal with irate customers. Monday morning they still were not answering their phone.
Of course I had a whole bunch of auctions closing on Sunday and Monday (for me a whole bunch anyway).
In the meantime, still dead in the water, we had an AOL disk that we did get on the internet with just to send some emails to customers and to check our auctions (we even listed two high dollar auctions that we had pre-prepared), but long distance surcharges applied to that (no local dial-up), so of course that wasn't practical.
This morning we decided we could wait no longer and paid for one month with the other available provider, only to find that when I returned home from signing up, that partial service had been restored with our *regular* provider (I called my wife from there to be sure they weren't online yet, then paid for new service, and shortly after that they came up). We still have no email service with them, and that has been for some 78 hours now.
I'd dump these losers NOW except that I just paid in advance for 6 months of service just a few weeks ago. We've been with this company for 2 full years and have had some problems occasionally but nothing like this.
I'll not be taking the service for granted again. I have learned just how dependent I have become on someone else's performance and abilities, and that is kind of unsettling. The last few days have been hellish. Very few of our winning bidders have emailed back to our "temporary" Yahoo address and I wonder what's up with that.
[ edited by loosecannon on Feb 5, 2001 08:46 PM ]
posted on February 5, 2001 09:47:05 PM new
I feel for you, loosecannon! We are so vulnerable when our ISPs have difficulties. When my ISP just "lost" a bunch of my emails, I thought I would have a panic attack! I wish you the best of luck!!!!
posted on February 5, 2001 10:04:06 PM new
Yes, I wonder how many emails intended for us bounced back to the sender. That doesn't look good to winning bidders or people wanting to ask a question. The whole thing cost us money one way or the other and is still causing hassles and we have catching up to do.
I guess I'm just venting some frustration but I needed to.
posted on February 5, 2001 10:07:14 PM new
Yeah the situation right now is not very good. I was very happy with my ISP for 3 years, but they were recently bought out by a larger ISP who in turn was bought out by an even larger ISP. Things have been really bad ever since.
When I started to look around for an alternative, I discovered there were no local ISPs left for my DSL connection. So I'm stuck with poor service, totally screwed up billing, and I'm getting very tired of training their technical support staff.
