Well - it works. And I'm not sure if I can be mad at the service provider or just at myself. I'm leaning toward them...

A week ago Saturday I got on the phone and dialed up their Customer Service number. A lovely recorded voice informed me that the wait time was currently over 30 minutes. I didn't have time for that at the moment so I decided to call back later, hoping for better results. I guess it's good to have a dream, huh?

I went about my business and, when later rolled around, I tried again. And again I was told it'd probably be more than a half hour but I needed to get this taken care of. I hunkered down and waited, hands-free earpiece dangling from my head like some bionic add-on. About 20 minutes or so went by and a guy came on, listened to my tale of woe and started tapping away on his keyboard.

To borrow from Douglas Adams: "For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen."

That's when I happened to look at my phone and saw that I was no longer on a call. Huh? What? That's right. Somehow I had gotten disconnected with no prior notice or warning. I had penty of battery power and cell signal. I was less than pleased.

So I dialed up again. This time, however, I didn't get the message about the 30 minute wait time. "Things are looking up," thought I. I was wrong. After FIFTY TWO FRICKIN' MINUTES I was greeted by a woman's voice and the whole dance started again. This was about 4:53 pm and Customer Service hours end at 5:00 so I was somehow glad to get in under the wire.

This woman seemed competent and went through resetting the modem, having me tell her which lights on it were going blinky-blinky, all that technical stuff. This went on for about 15 minutes or so.

With the modem in the basement, I headed back upstairs to try connecting again when it came to that point in the process. As I reached the top of the stairs, I heard that nasty little 3 tone bee-dee-deep sound that you get when you've dialed some invalid number. Nothing else. Almost not wanting to know the answer, I looked at my phone. Sure enough, I had gotten disconnected again. I was ready to throw something through the window.

I knew what was going to happen next, but I had to do it anyway. I redialed the number and was cheerfully informed that I had called after office hours. Oy.

I resolved that I would probably need to take a day off in order to deal with this.

Monday afternoon, I received a call from my installer who, it turns out, had recently upgraded to the same modem that I have and was having the same issue, though it only affect his email because that's all he used outside of a browser. I suspect if he had a need to SSH to some server for some reason, he wouldn't have been able to. He had finally gotten in touch with somebody in technical support (luckily, as a reseller, he has access to people that I don't and a bit more clout) who told him that all he had to do was go to their website and register his account. I gave it a shot and, Abracapocus, it's working with absolutely no problems.

My dilemma is this: Is it my fault? Or can I legitimately be miffed at the company for not letting anyone know (including the guy that they certified) that we had to do this in order to access anything useful?

I'm blaming them until I hear a compelling argument otherwise.