Microsoft Service Rant 2

Fruther Microsoft (non-)Service
Monica Wallace, from Bill Gates’ Office tried to help. She got me in touch with Mark Jefferies?.

Mark Jefferies? gave me his phone number, he would not give me his email id. His test of my phone line indicated that I had no DSL service at all. I reminded him that if I was to received DSL service it had to be DMT not CAP. He claimed, on 12/5, that he would request shipment of a router to arrive Airborne, two days. And that he would reprovision my line by then to be DMT not CAP. When I opened my front door on Saturday (upon returning from a business trip), I found an Airborne package containing a book and CD, but NO ROUTER.

I had heard from another technician from the Beaverton DSL office for MSN on Friday 12/7 (Paul, who could make outbound phone calls but couldn’t take inbound phone calls (exactly the opposite of all the other technicians that I had dealt with at MSN so far!!!)) that my DSL line was provisioned, but for CAP not DMT, which means it won’t work with the Aristicom modem anyway.

I had warned Mark of this problem on Wednesday, but he seemed to feel he could reprovision the line correctly (his test of my line showed there was no DSL at all to my house, which would have been new news, but Paul’s test on Friday seemed to indicate there was DSL, only the wrong flavor.)

I called into Tech support on Saturday to report my second BUG of the week in the MSN Explorer EMAIL system. Clancy attempted to be helpful in resolving the bug, although at one point she suggested I use either Explorer (native) or Netscape! to get onto Hotmail.com. I said I didn’t even know Netscape was available, and she said it wasn’t supported by her group, so they couldn’t do problem resolution on it. I kindly pointed out that I had had no trouble with Netscape in over two years, but I did have two problems this week with MSN.com email, so I wouldn’t even have to call her if I was using Netscape (joke!).

I resolved the email issue which was kind of simple yet very difficult to debug. The answer was to simply sign off and back on again, to clear some register or other that indicated that I had yet to open an email in my inbox, even though I had already opened. When I went to Hotmail.com directly it showed not one unopened email (as suggested by my MSN Explorer icon and inbox unopened email indicator), but TWO unopened emails. Both of these I had already opened. So, after signing off of explorer and MSN Explorer, and signing on again, I found that the email situation had stabilized.

Clancy also checked by DSL line. She also found that the line was incorrectly provisioned for CAP, not DMT.

I am leaving phone messages for Mark again to see if he can resolve the problems on Monday.