Those of you who know me or follow me know that I am seldom a Negative Ninny, but I have had bouts of negativism since December 17. This is the date that I first contacted my internet service provider to report that I was unable to access the internet. I was told that there were outages in my area and that my internet would be restored within a few hours and that the provider would contact me by phone. I waited a few days and then contacted them again and got the same story. I questioned the explanation, and the young man became very defensive and told me that he had done everything possible to troubleshoot the problem and that I had only been without service for 1 day and that was December 17. This lit a fire under my tired old body, and I decided to be the greasy wheel and contact them until something was done. This episode continued until this last Tuesday, Jan. 17, 2022.

During this period, I had intermittent internet service, and, on those days, I did not contact them, but on the days that I did not have service I continued to contact the number and received a call from the technical service department that the issue had been resolved and to contact them to acknowledge said fix. Aha, now I have the technology people’s phone which has up until now taken me ten or so minutes answering sometimes absurd questions and being told that if this did not solve my problem to go online to seek additional help. ?????? am I to go online?

I continued my campaign until I finally reached a young lady who genuinely tried to help and when she could not fix the problem referred me for a visit from the technician on Tuesday, Jan. 17 between 11 am and 2 pm. The technician arrived shortly before noon and found a faulty splitter and repaired the problem and even detected that the cable to my TV was loose and tightened it.

The day prior to his arrival a representative of the company contacted me to say that I would receive a service charge for the technician to which I replied, “I had better not.”  The technician said that he would write it up as a failure in their equipment so that I would not be charged. We will see. According to the company policy, I should not have to pay for the time between the service going out and it then being restored. We will see about that also. The fire that was lit under this elderly body may not have gone completely out so that it is ready for “the battle of the internet service bill.”

During this period, I tried using my phone to keep up with commitments that I had made to serve on committees and support groups. I made most of them, but the stress led to some feelings of exhaustion. I will admit that my no exhaustion experiment has been going well. I just must get used to it being ok that I sleep a lot some days. I have yet to shed that feeling of being lazy but know that I need to work hard to do that.