THE REDEMPTION OF SONIC.NET?

The saga continues.

Last night at 8 p.m. Andy told me that there was something to do with something else related to AT&T and the central office. He hoped the switch over would take place before the night was over and that he'd call back in the morning.

Like Glenn before him Andy never called back so Alan called Sonic this morning. I don't know the specifics of what this new CSR told Alan but he must have been especially apathetic because Alan lost his cool and HE NEVER DOES THAT. I'm the hot head in the family, ready to throw out an f-bomb at the first sign of trouble. But wow. Alan was not pleased with the direction that conversation took. At the time they were still saying Friday was the best they could do for us.

In the meantime the CEO of Sonic saw my blog (I tweeted out the link & cc'd him so he'd have to be blind not to have seen it). He apologized and said he hoped the company could earn back my trust over time. It's the time part I'm having trouble with as I want things fixed today, not on Friday.

I drove Alan to BART and decided I'd give the mother-in-law a call to let her know I'd be invading her house for the forseeable future. Except Alan called me back and said that Sonic had gotten back in touch with him, apologized for "the debacle" and promised to send someone out today. SUCCESS!

Meanwhile I ended up working from Peet's where my "one hour of free wifi" stretched into three. Another success! Oh, and the CEO tweeted back that it was his understanding that they were doing everything to fix the problem. There's something to be said for working with a small, local company - the man at the top of the food chain at least knew about our problem.

When I got back from Peet's a curious thing was happening. There was an AT&T van at my house "fixing" the problem from last week when our AT&T connection was out for a couple of days. He ended up on the phone with Alan and apologized for the delay - he was supposed to have been there on Friday. Whoops! Friday, Tuesday ... It's all the same. Alan explained to him that we'd cancelled our service and sent him on his merry way.

And then ANOTHER AT&T van pulled up. They were here to mess with the box outside and do the transition to Sonic. They were a bit dickish to me and wouldn't give me a straight answer about what they were doing and what happened with the porting.

While they were here the Sonic guys showed up. The AT&T guys were dicks to them to, not surprisingly. Ty from Sonic has been professional & courteous to me even though I've unleashed some vitriol of his company via the twitters.

Once the AT&T guys did whatever they did our Internet worked, albeit with terrible download speeds. Interesting. The theory is that AT&T has been to blame the whole time for the connectivity issue. Ty didn't like the download speed so he's been playing with our wires to make the service run at optimal levels. I've been very happy with his level of service. If this all works when he leaves Ty may have singlehandedly restored my faith in his company, something the CEO had hoped would and could happen.

We'll see how this goes. I have high hopes (where have you read that before?) while also being cynically optimistic.

Before wrapping this post up I also have to say how much I love the Blogger app on my iPhone.