Category: Activities

Thank you for calling AT&T, now go fuck yourself

Update: 3 hours later, it’s working again. No thanks to AT&T.

I have a Palm Treo. I’ve had it for over 2 years, and all during that time I’ve had the same cell phone plan, one which includes “unlimited internet”. And all during that time, I’ve used it at least daily to check my email – and since my employer cut off my access to my home computer, I’ve used it even more like several times an hour while I’m at work I also use it to check weather, check Google maps, and other things that require an internet connection. This morning, I’ve been unable to get to the internet.

So I called “The New AT&T”. And once again, their “trouble shooting” involved me taking out the battery and sim, trying and failing to read the tiny little 20 digit number on the SIM card, reading the IMEI number from the back of the phone, and then putting it all together and getting exactly the same results as before. The “helpful” AT&T tech said that one reason for my problems might be that my data plan is incompatible with the Treo, and I needed to switch to a PDA data plan. Except that she couldn’t make changes to the plan unless I could remember my wife’s social security number. I tried to explain that there is nothing wrong with the data plan as I’d been using it on a daily basis for more than 2 years, but she insisted that she couldn’t do any more trouble shooting unless i gave her my wife’s social security number so she could switch my data plan. I shudder to think how much more a “PDA data plan” is going to cost.

So the question in my mind is: is this a temporary outage on their network that the tech wouldn’t admit, a problem with my phone, or did they just notice that I’ve had the wrong data plan after 2 years and suddenly cut me off? And how does this affect the probability of me buying a iPhone when the 3G ones come out?

Construction project, Day 3.5

I had a phone call from a very nice person at PygmyBoats. She was calling me because I’d ordered the wrong size spray skirt for the kayak kit I’d ordered, and she wanted to know if I was ordering them for the kit, or for another boat. It turns out that the Arctic Tern 14 is a “medium” size boat, but the Arctic Tern Hi Volume is a “large” size boat. Also, when I saw the “1 hand toggle” on the order form, I’d actually ordered 1 pair. Oh, and I got the UPS tracking number – they said that I should get it Friday or Monday. I’m hoping it’s Friday for obvious reasons.

Construction project, Day 2

Another day of interesting discoveries:

  • Our drill SUCKs. It’s a not incredibly old Skil 4.1 Amp corded drill, and it doesn’t have enough power consistently to drill 3 inches into the end of a 2×4. It also has a standard old chuck instead of one of those new quick ones – I must have spend 80% of my time switching between drill bit and nut driver bit.
  • In spite of having a degree in structural engineering, I forgot that a parallelepiped with non-rigid joints needs cross bracing or it will collapse. I guess I’ll go get some strapping or something tomorrow.
  • This is probably going to end up being a fair weather project. After finishing the two parallelepiped, I put the particle board sheet on one (and attempted to put on the second one, but that one collapsed), and there is almost no room to move around the garage. I might rip a foot off the edge of the sheets to give me some room.

Anyway, the work surface is nearly done, and I can probably safely go ahead and order the kit.

Why don’t companies get the message about password changing?

I’ve seen dozens if not hundreds of articles stating the completely obvious: If you make people change their passwords every 90 days, put in place complexity rules and checks to stop them reusing passwords, and make them change the password on 4 different systems, the end result will be that people will need to write down their passwords somewhere near their computer. So why hasn’t the company I work at gotten that message yet?

It’s bad enough that I have to use the password recovery feature on 2 of those systems because it’s evidently not the one I wrote down, but the wonderful little system I use for generating passwords I can remember doesn’t work if I have to keep changing it.