Seriously.

Yesterday I was happily surfing the internet over my morning coffee. Happily! Then my internet cut out. Aw, I thought. That sucks. But then I thought perhaps there was some maintenance going on, since it was a low-volume time. Ah, that's alright. I will actually go outside today and socialize with other humans! So I was happy again.

Until I got home in the evening, that is. Then I was quickly unhappy again. Still no internet!

So we gave Telus' tech line a call. Quel suprise! The account had been turned off for non-payment! What the? No, they couldn't fix it on a Sunday night. We would have to call Billing Department in the morning.

Went to bed very unhappy and a little miffed, to boot.

Woke up feeling similarily. Instead of surfing the internet over my morning coffee, I called Telus. Got in the queue. Finally found out that no, they can't tell me anything because the account is in my man's name, even though it's my credit card that is being charged.

So over HIS morning coffee, my man called Telus. Surely we should be getting to the bottom of this by now! Ah, so simple, the gum-snapping woman said! Our credit card expired! Oh, so it's no problem. I will give them the new info and we'll be up lickety split. What? There's interest? Well I hadn't known the card they had expired! They hadn't billed me since July! This is where it got fun.

My man: We didn't know the card had expired, so we didn't bother calling you.

Billing Woman: We sent you an email to the email address on the account. We sent out a mass email explaining our new account numbering system.

My man: I didn't know we had an email on the account. I use my gmail, not Telus.

Billing Woman: Well, we called you twice.

My man: What number?

Billing Woman: The number on the account.

My man: You have my cell number on the account. The number attached to the ADSL doesn't have a phone plugged into it. We got the ADSL because we didn't have to pay for a separate phone line that we would never use. Call the other number on the account. It's my business line. In fact, it's listed as the business number for my account.

Billing Woman: We sent you a letter.

My man: To this address? It never arrived.

Billing Woman: *sigh* That's not my problem. You should answer your phone more often. But this time we'll turn it back on and reverse the interest charges. You should check your email, too.

So today I have my internet back. But thanks to Telus, I have a much bigger headache.

I feel pretty accomplished today. I woke up at 9am, made coffee, made my man a sandwich for his lunch at work, the jumped in bed for a quickie to start my day off right! Since then I have vaccuumed the entire suite, even the edges of rooms, TSP'd and rinsed the entrance hallway to prep for painting, mopped all the laminate flooring, had lunch, had a shower, tidied the bedroom, did a load of laundry, did a load of dishes, and got the archive photos ready for tonight's update to my site. So far so good!

Oh, and last night I made my first purchase through Craigslist. We tracked down a person with the full Telus "Home connect" kit from two years ago: a Dlink 300G modem with all the right plugs and wires. $26 and it was ours! So we took it home, plugged it in, and plugged the landlord's wireless router into it to serve our net up to the landlord, then plugged the Linksys Vonage router into the other router, and BAM! Everything works! My VOIP works, the internet is fast *and* solid, and the landlord has internet! Telus is still sending us the Thompson modem, but at least we know that this setup is reliable.

Thank you everyone for your helpful support and thoughts! :)

+ My new ADSL modem/router/firewall thingy arrived today. It's a 2Wire 2700HG-E.
- The 2Wire took over an hour to set up.
- The diagnostics is disabled at Telus' end.
- It drops connection every 20 minutes or so and needs to be rebooted sometimes.
- There are hundreds of forum posts about the unit on dslreports.com complaining about the unit and its shortcomings.
- The 2Wire throttles my speed. Last night on the landlord's modem (an old D-Link 300G) I was able to maintain connection all night long and had 63kbps upload speeds. The best I can get with the 2Wire is 58kbps.
- The 2Wire does not manage load sharing very well. When one computer is hard wired and another is connected wirelessly, the hard wired computer nearly loses browsing capability entirely.
+ Telus agreed to send us a different router/modem/firewall, the Thompson 516, within five more business days and to credit us for the postage used to return the 2Wire. So far forum browsing shows the Thompson to be stable and well-liked.
- I tried to plug my Linksys Vonage router into the 2Wire's WAN port, to no avail. Apparently Telus has disabled the port or does not support it.
+ My boyfriend received a call back from management at Telus shortly after arranging the exchange for the Thompson. Apparently many people are complaining about the 2Wire, but nobody is able to tell them specifically what is wrong with the unit. He explained about dslreports.com to the manager, and she was very attentive. That was nice.
- My connection is still unstable.
- We have wires running everywhere from testing the various combinations and this room is a mess.
- Several hours of my day have been used up dealing with this.


On a completely unrelated note, I have lost my cell phone charger and my phone just gave its final dying beep before going black.