I was buying some textbooks for Nina, secondhand on the net, because they cost four times more in the bookstore. When we were done (found two, third had to come from the store), she said
We went today to report the dowfall of the ceiling (it started to fall apart again and last night one brick/boulder, of medium size, fell into the tub) and to the library, and on te way back we went to see tat kroger. In front of the kroger the note says „coming soon“ and the parking is still closed, so we need to wait for it to start working in the first place before we can start using it. And while we walked the majstors came and didn't get anything fixed, just broke off the fallen piece of the ceiling board and the part of the ceiling which hung over the bathtub and dragged that board over so on its other part now, which stayed whole, water from above drips. All in all, it seems we'll have to yank their chain several times more until they come to fix that.
A copy of my email to abuse@verizon.net, on this day.
Please, forward this to DSL tech support
...because for some reason there's absolutely no email address of theirs published anywhere on your website, and I've spent whole hour looking for a way to reach them.
Not by phone, phone is out of the picture. I've spent about six hours on the phone while I was trying to get my DSL hooked up (plus another 10 hours trying to get a phone line, change my options etc etc). I also refuse to use the Online Control Pad, for the following reasons:
- it behaves like a chat window. It takes several minutes for anyone on your side to respond, and then if I'm not there by the monitor, monitoring the response, they just type (or rather paste) a general sentence and vanish for few minutes more. I don't have the time to stare at the tiny editbox and wait to be addressed. Send me an email.
- there's absolutely no way that I can preserve the contents of this chat window for future reference. There's no paper trail. Verizon is my 6th (sixth) ISP, and this is the first time that I have no way of logging my communications with them.
The reason why I'm writing this (to Tech Support - the term "email abuse*" applies here only as "this is the first tech support I ever saw that doesn't have an email address published on the company website") is that recently I started experiencing several disconnections a day on my DSL line. Depending on what I was doing at the moment, it could be completely disconnecting (I see my IP phone rebooting) or affecting just some of the services I am running. For instance, this Saturday (8/23) I was remote operating, and I had to reconnect ten times at least. The total count for the day was sixteen disconnections. The service seems to reconnect immediately, judging by the lights - but all the software doesn't. Some of it loses connection completely and I have to either restart the app or tell it to reconnect; some of it (those which poll the connection once in a few minutes) are able to recover automatically sometimes.
Yesterday (8/24) it happened only three times (that I've noticed - but I wasn't really watching it all day): at 9:54, 13:07 and at 14:50**.
And it just happened again, four minutes ago.
I would like to be contacted by some of your numerous technical personnel. Don't tell me to call any phones - ALL of your numbers are either impossible to get, or require twenty minutes of more of holding, and then explaining the whole story over and over to ten different people who have no idea what I'm talking about. It's very frustrating, and a huge waste of my time - unless you're willing to pay my company's fee of $100/hr for it.
I am sure you can find my phone number in your tables - I have typed it at least ten times into various textboxes on your website.
Now with the Iraq adventure underway, with the so-called „coallition of the willing“, few phenomena emerged. One was the reassignment of the Frenches into morally-politically inappropriate camp, so it was already suggested (and partially enforced) to rename „french fries“ (i.e. pommes frittes) into „freedom fries“ (it sure does), blithely ignoring the fact that the charges were misaddressed, the actual inventors of the staple were the Belgians. Amers and geography.
And on the Gugao the standard search for „french military victories“ yields „nothing found“ - which is impossible, it should at least find those who bragged overyester how it yielded none, so this is an obvious setup by someone in there. [and, miraculously, it stayed permanently, even in 2025 it still returned nothing]
And all of that just because France did not want to take a part in attacking Iraq.
The other thing were the bumper stickers. There are no bumpers anymore, it's a piece of plastic now, but still there's the vertical part of the trunk lid, or the fifth door or the tailgate, whatever one has. Amers are prone to cram up to twony-therty such stickers with messages there, and there are good ones („avoid fakes, elect a real pirate - Warren Buffett!“, „Keep Virginia clean - spay your politician“), and brownnosing („I love black people“, „I love jet noise“ - sure enough, Virginia Beach gets a billion dollars windfall from the defense budget a year, what with all those bases and people from the end working there), and support for this or that noble cause. One of the latter kind was the pink ribbon, shaped like an upside down γ, which was supposed to be in support for the fight against cancer (cervical, I guess), and allegedly the proceeds of the sales went into that. With those charity fundraising efforts there was always the suspicions of murky dealings; some local initiatives may do it honestly and really pass 90% of the money to the cause. In many other cases the proportion was inverse, the costs add up, it being done by professionals, who, by definitions, do it for money. And now there are these purple ribbons, usually accompanied with „support our troops“. Soon there was a comment on UA „by which you surely support the sellers of those ribbons“. I don't remember ever seeing any announcement of this being organized, they appeared surreptitiously, pretending to be a spontaneous charity movement. But then why collect money for the military, they got money poured in by trucks, literally, and a couple of such trucks vanished, a few billion bucks have vanished without a trail.
On top of it, these weren't real stickers, these were magnets, the technology to make foil suffused with enough magnetic particles was just perfected and went commercial. Nice when you have an awkward sticker and need to park in the wrong part of town, just remove it and offend nobody.
-----
* substance abuse is when you keep it in the dark, no bread no water no fresh air no visits no phone calls. We do even worse than that to our sugar.
** I guess I tried to confuse the enemy here, having the date in american format but the times in 24-hour.
29-IV-2024 - 7-II-2026