Living In The 1980’s

Most of you have no idea what it was like connecting to the Source or Compuserv at 110/300/1200 baud. The baud rate is approximately ten times the character rate, so the 110 baud modems actually sent and received information at 10 characters per second.

Trying to work on the ‘Net with an effective throughput of 120 characters per second means that most things time-out before they are finished. You have e-mail, but you really hate the attachments on spam which come down in minutes not milliseconds.

People who are stuck on dial-up today are connected at 56,000 baud, 5,600 characters per second, which makes a lot of sites pretty unusable for them.

I had to call to find out what happened and there was nothing I wanted to hear less than the voice on hold telling me that most problems could be resolved with the wonderful diagnostic wizard available on-line at the support web site. Only the cats heard me screaming that if I could get to their bloody on-line web site I wouldn’t actually have a problem. Building a web site to resolve Internet problems makes as much sense as using colored lines on the floor to indicate emergency exits at a school for the blind – the people who need the information don’t have access.

At the end of working through menu trees and waiting on hold you hear a bored voice telling you that for some reason the system is totally hosed in your area, and it might be back tomorrow, or maybe not, but they are real sorry it happened.

I don’t guess they have the ability to send a broadcast e-mail to the people affected to give them that information. It’s probably cheaper to have thousands of people calling the support line and working their way through it. It’s not as if they could have made an automated call on the telephone they insist you have, to explain things. Being The Phone Company it probably never occurred to them.

The sad thing is that the local cable company is worse. The cable was down in my area for the last couple of days. It was easy to tell it is down when there’s a bucket truck next to a pole and the guy is working on two ends of what is supposed to be a single cable.

In case you were wondering, there will absolutely, positively not be an adjustment to the bill for this outage. You are paying for a month of access to their system, not actual usage.  Like Microsoft, they guarantee the medium, not the content.