Back to the Stone Age

I just moved in to my new apartment last weekend. I got a nice bed at Ikea, and some cheap furniture from Wal-Mart. I now need a sofa and maybe a computer desk.

Speaking of computer, I am experiencing the terrible delays, innuendos of signing up to a high-speed Internet service. I chose Bell Sympatico (total performance, at 7 Mbit/s), of course not because of their recent rebranding. I signed up to get my service activated on August 16th (five days, from Aug 11, the day I placed my order on Bell's website). Then, come the 16th, my phone is active, but I don't get my modem! What happened to it? I call 310-BELL, and 310-SURF, don't get what has happened. The lady was just saying that it would be delivered again.

On Monday night, I don't find the modem in my mail, throw a tantrum on the customers' service line. The next morning (this morning), I call the high-speed Internet hotline, and find out that Purolator tried to deliver, but didn't have a buzz code (I did not provide them with one, since I did not know it!), so kept it in their depot in Ville St-Pierre without even leaving a paper saying that they came by! So, I go all the way to Ville St-Pierre (320 Norman), get the modem. Tonight, I try it, and find out that the phone line's "capacity to do PPPOE" is somehow not active on my side...

But my account is definitely active, because I am using my dial-up access! So there I am, using my phone modem for the first time. Can you imagine that? Gmail takes time to load, and I need to use its HTML-only version... Even a terminal over SSH is painful.

Now, the Bell technician is supposed to come "within the next three days". Was my phone line mis-activated? Did rats gnaw on a part of the phone cable that was critical for my Internet? To be continued...

Update: They just forgot to activate my line... I'm now back to the 21st century.