Another Day, Another Bad Experience

First, the cable company corrected the Blogspot filtering issues. They said it was a spam filter that needed some fine tuning and that is fixed now. Yesterday the cable guy came out and cut the end connectors off of the outside connections to the house and replaced them but my signal measurements were exactly the same afterwards as they were before (well within limits) so I didn't think he fixed anything. And he didn't. An hour or two after he left T3 errors popped up and at 11 I had to power down the modem and plug it back in to get online. Today I went to the single cable company office which serves a huge area and within 15 minutes I had rented a replacement modem. The guy at the next window was getting a new modem too but he was yelling and saying that he hoped this was a new modem since the last 3 he had been issued didn't work. The counter person told him they all have been tested before they come out of the warehouse and all work fine. So I went home to start the 10 minute job of switching out modems (1 minute to change the actual connections and 9 minutes to wait for the cable company to re-provision it on their end). Over an hour later, the cable lady on the phone and I gave up on getting the replacement modem back and managed to get my old one working again. Out of the bag, the one they gave me didn't light up right. We still went through the motions and several power cycles and PC reboots but it just wasn't going to work. So I put mine back into service (took no time at all) and I will be making a return trip way across town to try another modem tomorrow. The one they leased me is the same make as my old one and should have fired right up. The lady was very nice and asked if I was a teacher because I was so patient (a poll worker asked me that too back in November as she too said I was very patient). The lady said she would credit me two weeks of service for my inconvenience.

While that was going on, some friends from church called and said there was a school fundraiser at the Red Robin restaurant near us and invited us to join them for supper. So we ran over there. At the end of the night, each family presented our credit cards for the separate checks. A few minutes later our waitress and a manager came over and said they had accidentally put both charges on my card! They said they could try and reverse the charges but the bank would freeze that amount for 3 days. I said that was fine and the other family could buy dinner next time. No biggie. The manager was very apologetic and nice and going out of her way to say how sorry she was for what they thought was a huge error (it was no big deal to me). So I jokingly said that a little dessert to go might make things a little better for us... Next thing I know, out comes two HUGE chocolate mud slide desserts! And, they corrected the bill! So the lesson I told the kids was that being patient SOMETIMES pays off. There is nothing to be gained by getting belligerent or rude when people are trying their best and it just doesn't work out sometimes.