I actually did a couple of the things that have been on my To Do list for about the last year. Here's the latest:.
My insurance, which resumed six months ago, requires me to pick a PCP right away. I want to avoid the status quo and the powers that be as much as possible, so I didn't want an MD. The only variation offered by my insurance is a few DO's (Doctors of Osteopathy), so I picked the one closest to my house. Already I'm thinking that I should have picked the woman DO, not the man. We'll see...
Now, this might have been a disaster for a paranoid person, and I am a paranoid person, but I also know more about DSL than most people. So I figured that they weren't just blacklisting me because they found out I suck dick, I concluded (rightly, I might add) that they encountered a silly stupid little problem with my particular phone line, which is not uncommon in the DSL provisioning process. Covad then decided, to their detriment, to end our relationship. Silly Covad.
Since Covad had not answered my question about what the obstacle was, I decided to ask, not a DSL sales person, but a tech support person at some other DSL provider. The tech support people are not being told what to say and what not to say; and they usually know what they are saying when they say it, unlike the sales people. So, at 12:30 AM Wednesday morning, I e-mailed tech support at MegaPath.net, explaining the issue in detail, and I actually got an intelligent response. In less than an hour. From Jeff Rohrich, the VP of Service Delivery and Support. What counts is not the 'VP' title, what counts is his willingness to be identified to me, by name and by whatever title he has—'maintenance engineer' would have been fine. But what counts most is that he explained what options there were for getting around my particular obstacle. The option I chose—from Megapath—is a separate, dedicated SDSL line, which Covad could have provided, and it will cost roughly three times more than the line Covad could not install, but I will be paying MegaPath, not Covad. In a deliciously ironic twist, MegaPath will be hiring Covad field technicians to do the install.
This is admittedly an unfair comparison, comparing Covad's sales people to MegaPath's tech support people. But I don't care. Hopefully, deities willing, I will have an excellent DSL connection soon, which is a hell of a lot more than Covad offered. And MegaPath will even move the line once free during the first twelve months, so I can apartment shop angst-free.