Monday, February 26, 2007

An Open Letter to Earthlink

Dear Asswipes,

Remember when you used to be Mindspring? Well, I've been using Earthlink since before that. I used you when you were Netcom and I was using a 1200 baud modem. Long time.

So here's a little tip from a long-time customer: when my DSL has been acting up, and I've spent way too much time fiddling around with the diagnostics page that popped up instead of my home page, turning modems on and off, rebooting computers, and listening to recorded messages touting Earthlink's superior service while I waited to talk to a real live human, (Yo, buddy--how's the weather in Mumbai?) once my internet connection is working properly again, I am really not about to waste any time whatsoever taking internet surveys.

You see, you've been getting my money for years. And you've wasted far too much of my time.

I'm not begrudging the money ... not really. But my time? Is priceless. When I am dead and gone, my tombstone, if any, will not read: "I wish I had spent more time on hold with Earthlink."

So. When I spotted an email with "Support Survey from Earthlink" as the subject line, to delete it was, for me, the work of a nanosecond.

Very truly yours,
Poppy Buxom

6 comments:

  1. My DSL line has been down since 2/22/07 at 2am pacific. It is now 2/26/07 and I've been assured someone will *look* at the problem by 2/27/07 cob. I spent 14 hours on hold with tech support just to log a frigging ticket. There are no more humans to be found at any of there numbers. I've been a customer since they were netcom, I think 1996 maybe earlier. I used to have telnet access to servers. My mail server was ix.netcom.com. I spoke to "TRON" at 18667944371. I talked to corporate at 18007194664. I used the priority support number 18668601053 with pin code 2000. I talked to level 1, level 2, level 3, some lady in india that swore it was a wrong number. Someone kept repeating "No, it's a genuine crytal face" in the background while I was waiting on one SAP. Earthlink, you are gone, history, you suck, I have the flu with 102 temperature and I just went to your corporate headquaters and licked the door handles of every car in a reserved spot. Even if you agreed to 97% uptime for my connection, you owe for for 6 months of dsl service right now, and the situation doesn't look to be improving. I can't believe how many people lied to me, I can't believe that 3 different systems that you use for order processing have been down for 5 days. Twice I agreed to let an agent call me back only to be called by a computer that assured me everything was ok, and that I should call back in and restart the process if it was still a problem. I can't believe that someone way overseas told me that the problem was due to a outage in california, 650 miles away from me in los angeles, and that everything would be resolved in a "couple hours". I can't believe that you don't know when outages started, or when they are expected to be repaired. I can't believe that one of your subcontractors just decided to "disassociate" my dsl line at 2am precisely on a thursday morning. My server gets crawled by search bots constantly. The last time in the log is the time that the last socket timed out on a send. That time is 2:02am on thurday morning. I bet your
    operations staff has been warning you this was going to come for a long frigging time too, and now it has and there is no recovery plan.

    ARGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH

    ReplyDelete
  2. I tell you, if Blogger's not messing up my life, Comcast DSL is.

    I hate it when I can't surf and have no recourse but to do laundry.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Any of you jinx me, and might as well fire up the bass boat and go fishin' with Fredo, 'cause you're dead to me.

    I'm just sayin'.

    -J.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I was also a Netcom customer starting
    around 1995. I recall that they used to have pretty good customer service, but after each buyout it got progressively worse. I was stuck since I lived in an area that was a little slow upgrading their infrastructure. I finally moved to Verizon DSL as soon as it was available. The only good thing about suubscribing to "Earthstink" was being able to vent whenever they gave me a customer satisfaction survey.

    ReplyDelete
  5. If you really want to hate your life, sign up for Netzero.

    ReplyDelete

Gentle Readers:

For the time being, I have turned off comment moderation. Please don't spam; it's not nice.

xxx, Poppy.