Creason Family

The ongoing saga of the Yamhill Creasons' DSL "adventure" (I use that term very loosely). We have been without internet access at home since Wednesday, June 13...... How can civilized people possibly exist without internet access??!!!

I have now spent several hours on the phone trying to troubleshoot this problem. For much of it, I was on "hold," but for the majority, I was actually connected to someone -- and each and every one of them had some strange accent, some heavier than others. One poor woman must have thought I was deaf; I had to continually ask her to repeat her instructions a second, third, or fourth time. If I remember correctly, I have had four conversations with Verizon (even have the phone number memorized), and one very frustrating conversation with someone at Netgear.

I have repeated the process of "go to Start; click Run; type in "CMD"; then to type other, various things in the resulting little black box. Each time, the person on the other end was dissatisfied with the resulting messages. Something about no IP address........sounds like a serious problem when you're trying to access the internet.

I have also repeated other processes over and over, according to the various "excellent, qualified technicians' " instructions which led me down rabbit trails, straight to nowhere. I nearly cried when the guy told me to connect the router directly to my laptop, while the modem was connected to the router. Didn't think there were anymore ethernet cables in the house, so he wanted me to hang up and call back when I found one. Luckily I found one in the nick of time.

It was incredibly confusing to be told by a Verizon tech that we must contact Netgear to "release our IP address" since they were the manufacturer of our router. (Never mind that nothing worked even bypassing the wireless router with direct cables.) After that long, confusing conversation and more "Start/Run/cmd....," he told me I must call Verizon again to GET our IP address. What????

I now know that 168.192.1.1 is something all techs understand (at least they act like they do).

I also wanted to cry when the guy told me that since everything was "fine" I would have to find a local computer tech to check out and replace my laptop's "ethernet adapter." If I hadn't proven that BOTH computers in our home had lost connectivity at the same time, he would have written it off. But because of that, he BRILLIANTLY concluded that "the modem is bad." Well, we went out and bought a brand new VERIZON modem/router combination ($90, thank you), and we still don't have internet access. Yes, unbelievable, isn't it.

Yesterday a live English-speaking technician - somewhere in Oregon - checked out our phone lines. He left us two voice mails to inform us that there is something wrong with our line.......

So......I'm looking forward to yet another phone conversation with Verizon. Same phone number: 800.567.6789.

[the above is not meant to be disparaging to any technical computer people, especially our sons. It probably reflects more on my own ignorance and frustration. :)]