Good Riddance

It has been awhile since I last posted an entry. What kept me busy? Cussing on my internet service provider day in, day out.

For three long weeks my DSL service bogged down. I've been a subscriber for about four years with my ISP (PLDT) and never had such a huge issue with them until recently. I could only browse selected websites and everything I try to open takes forever to load. I'm pretty sure the fault is not from my end coz I reformatted my computer and I directly connected the other computers at home to the DSL, but still to no avail.

After much effort, I decided to call their tech support department. Mind you, I dont like contacting them one bit because the wait time before a representative picks up usually take hours... literally! And so without having too much options, I decided to anyway and set my mind to be very, very, and I mean veeeeery patient.

After waiting for almost 2 hours (I was on speaker phone the whole time), someone finally answered. I just tried to cooperate and went through the whole elementary troubleshooting steps to correct the problem. Obviously, nothing worked. The agent on the other line told me to just wait for a few hours and hopefully things will be back to normal. Wait... Did I just hear the agent say hopefully? Oh man, that did it. My patience got streched to its limits again and I just had to burst. I am not paying a service that costs a month-good of groceries to just be hopeful that I'd get a better service. For three weeks I havent been getting my money's worth and the agent on the other line would want me to be hopeful that things will get better in a few hours.

I spoke with his supervisor and yelled and yelled and yelled and yelled. I thought I was gonna have apoplexy from too much yelling. But I guess that worked because the following day, they sent a "technician," who was supposed to make things back to the way it was before. Did it? Nooooooooo! And the worst part is, the guy didn't have the slightest clue on what to do. And even blamed me for the problem because I might have installed some software that's preventing me from surfing the internet. With that, I almost kicked him out of the door. I just tried to remain calm. I asked the guy, "What's your job in PLDT?" He answered, "I'm a phone lineman." At that point I was ambivalent. I felt like laughing and crying and dying all at the same time.

I got nothing against linemen. I mean it's a decent job. But for crying out loud, I am not getting computer lessons from someone who spends the most of his days up a post and hooking up wires and doesnt know the web address of hotmail. Believe me, when he tested my computer, he spelled hotmail as hotmale. Somebody shoot me!

Anyway, I just pretended that I believed his story and told him that I'll just wait for things to get better so as not to break his heart. As soon as he left, I called my freaking service provider and told them to cancel my service right then and there and not even bother to save me as their customer because there's no freaking way that I'm gonna change my mind about it. Exhale.

I'm a happier person now since I switched to cable. I'm paying one-grand less for a service that is 4 times faster than my DSL. All I can say is good riddance.