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Another ISP Stumbles

My ISP recently informed me that it was migrating servers. This was, of course, for my benefit, would provide me with a better interface, more security..yadda, yadda, yadda. I am liquidating some equipment for a client. I sent out 50 emails one Monday requesting bids on the equipment. On Thursday I began to wonder why I was getting no response when I got a call following up on an emailed offer. Since I get multiple email accounts in my Outlook I didn’t notice that I was getting NO email in from my business account. So all those emails were wasted as I was unable to get any responses. The ISP took 3 days to straighten out the receiving problem. I discovered Saturday morning I could get email in my business account but I could not send from it any more. I could do it before they “fixed” the email problem but after I could receive but not send. After another several hours we got it “all” fixed.

The following Thursday I got an email stating my site was migrated and I should check it. I did and it wasn’t working correctly. I happened to use FrontPage to create that site and my FrontPage extensions were no longer enabled. So I went out to enable them. It would not enable due to some .htaccess files that I had to track down and delete before it would enable. It said it enabled….it didn’t. After over one hour waiting online for a tech chat, I got a guy who said my FrontPage extensions were corrupt, backup my site and he would delete it and I could then upload it back up after he fixed the FrontPage extensions. I did so and the web page was partially republished. Of course I discovered then that I could receive email but not to Outlook. I had to go to their site and download a patch to allow me to receive to Outlook. Now I think it is all working but I refuse to hold my breath because that would lead to certain death.

The point I am making here, admittedly verbosely, is that why is it that people we are paying to provide us with a service can claim to be upgrading our experience and in the process providing us with loss of business and umpteen hours of reconstruction. Rather than the “Customer is always right’, it appears to be the customer isn’t even considered.

I’m mostly retired, reasonably computer literate and it took me hours to solve my issues. What about the folks who aren’t retired, don’t have the time to spare and are not quite as literate? If we are evolving into a service economy then we better start seeing some service, somewhere, PLEASE!

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