| Tuesday, July 29, 2003 |
12:01 - Notworking
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Just a little status report on our ever-lengthening efforts to get a partial T1 into the house.
(And before anyone asks what the hell we're going to all this trouble for, we need symmetrical bandwidth and the ability to host our own servers. We don't get DSL here-- the CO five hundred feet away was installed in the longlongago for a subdivision that was never actually built, so it's "dark"-- and Comcast cable service isn't symmetric and doesn't allow hosting or fixed IPs. This is our only option.)
In mid-June, I signed the contract with the connectivity provider, who I must note has been exemplary with service since day one, as I would expect from a business-grade networking provider. The trouble is that he has to order the line through Pac Bell/SBC, then XO has to do the provisioning. And SBC in particular is a huge faceless monopolistic bureaucracy. It's like having desktop support administered by the DMV. It's like-- well, hell, it's the phone company. All the jokes have already been written.
So anyway, mid-June, and they send out the order. They promise, by the way, that they will have the T1 installed by July 1. Over the ensuing three weeks, however, it transpires from a series of calls to the provider, who tries desperately to get a human voice on the line from within the SBC monolith and not just a terse computerized status message, that the SBC site surveyors have tried on three separate occasions to come to my house and reconnoiter-- only on all three occasions to go to the wrong address. At one point they misread 1787 as 1878. At another, they mistook Spagthorpe Pines Ct. for Spagthorpe Avenue. (Names and numbers have been changed to protect the-- heh-- innocent.) A third time they got the street number and the street wrong. Each time we deluged them with e-mails and phone calls correcting them, and each time it sent the job back to the end of the Holy Favor Queue, so it meant it cost us another full week each time the site-surveyor guy had to stand in the forecourt of a strip mall somewhere making a bewildered cell-phone call to the mothership about how there wasn't any damn house anywhere in sight.
So that was some time ago, ages ago, ancient history. It's a whole new chapter now.
See, the guy finally came out. He looked up and down our front yard, rubbed his chin, and announced that he had no idea where SBC's junction box was. There was no access hatch. There was one labeled "Pacific Bell", but inside there was only TV cable-- the box had been co-opted by Comcast in their recent upgrade pass (for which, by the way, I am massively grateful). Our phone line was buried. Bare. No conduit. Just the bare two lines, dropped in a trench and covered over. We couldn't even try to dig it up, because of all the gas and electrical and sewer and other lines running through our flower bed.
Why not just do without a phone? I asked. You know-- use the two existing phone lines, the existing four wires, to carry the T1. We could put in a new phone line at our leisure. But no-- proceeedure. They'd have to shut off the phone line, verify its being shut off, then put in the work orders to get the T1 provisioned; that would take another week or two, and meanwhile we'd have no phone or network. And while the whole point of this exercise is ostensibly so we can have Internet connectivity at home, we're currently using the phone line as a 24-hour dialup so friends can come over and play MMORPGs all night long. So scratch that.
So we had to dig a new trench and lay new conduit. Which we did. Or, more correctly, we had a guy do it for us. It was the guy who had come out from the City of San Jose when we called the 1-800-POO-GAS-10-10-987-12500DOWNTHECENTER call-before-you-dig number, to mark the sidewalk where the buried lines were. (You call the number, an automated signal is sent out over the Sub-Etha, and hundreds of scuttling bureaucrats come swooping by in vans with cans of orange and red paint, marking where the water and cable and electrical and other lines all go, and then vanish into the night.) So the city guy came back and offered to dig the trench for us. "Times are tough," he said. He was out of work, having previously been a contractor for the phone company. His clothes and car weren't as nice as those worn by the SBC site-surveyor, but he got a whole helluva lot more of my respect. Especially considering how hot a day it was, and how he did the whole job by hand. By choice.
So now there's a trench running through our flowerbed, a four-inch gully cut across our concrete walkway that goes around the side of the house (the ground underneath was apparently once the parking lot for the power substation next door, so it's clay and sand that's packed super-hard-- or, as we like to call it in the parlance, concrete; so no digging the dirt out from under the walkway), and a conduit endpoint sticking up out of the ground next to the input box at the side of the house. The other end of the conduit is in a hole next to the sidewalk, and there's a rope running the length of the conduit, the better to pull the phone line through when the time comes.
Which, we now learn, is an indeterminate time away.
We called the SBC guy back (I wouldn't let him leave, the day he came out and rubbed his chin, without leaving an accurate human name and cell-phone number), and let him know that the trench was ready. So he told us he'd get back to us. And get back to us he did-- yesterday.
I don't know whether he had to go to the house to find this out, or if he just made the proclamation from his truck on the freeway somewhere; but his new insight is that well, fine, we have a trench now-- but SBC still has no idea where the buried junction box is. But-- oh, and here's the best part-- their suspicion is that it's buried directly under the sidewalk.
They have to find out for sure. So SBC Man waits three days for the time-sensitive task to ferment properly, then sends out the work order to have some "exploratory digging" done-- apparently they couldn't have done this any earlier, like at the same time we were getting the trench dug-- and see if they can't find that box. For all we know, we might have put the trench ten feet away from the box. But hell, it's in their court now; all we had to do was get the line to the curb. Now it's up to them. And they have to pay for it. (I've even heard stories about the phone company coming out to install a line, tearing up the sidewalk and a slice of the road, laying the line, repaving the sidewalk and the road, and being done before the sun set. This was the provider's SBC liaison guy whose story it was.) Theoretically my work is done.
Except that if the box does turn out to be under the sidewalk, they'll have to get a permit from the city to dig up the sidewalk. Which means another week or two. And we won't know until tomorrow whether we'll have to do that. But after that they have to recondition the line, because in the 13 years since the neighborhood was built, apparently all of Western technology was invented, and the pavement and technology were all laid down together under the assumption that 1950s equipment would suffice us for the next century at least, or until the nukes flew and leveled the cul-de-sac and allowed us all to start afresh without any of those pesky flower gardens or homeowners to get in the way.
Fine. I'm resigned to the idea of not having any net at home for another couple of months. The provider called me here at work a few minutes ago for a status report and to ask me how things were coming on my end, and I had great fun telling him. I'm past the phase of being angry or frustrated, and am now just enjoying making up new adjectives to use over the phone. Again, the provider guy is being superlatively helpful and sympathetic-- there's just nothing he can do. The moment there is, you can bet, that damn line will be hooked up and we'll be sailing happily away into the bitstream. But for now, we wait. And I try to write desultory book chapters on a machine with no access to Software Update.
I'm sure CapLion will tell me that if I lived in New York, this would all have been taken care of with a tip of the hat by smiling Maytag repairmen six weeks ago. I have to imagine that if we were ordering the T1 from SBC directly, instead of getting it relabeled through a provider, there wouldn't have been any of that "escalation to the manager level" or "not being able to find the address for three weeks"; you'd think, being the phone company, they might even have been able to call the number and ask where the house was, or even look in their database and see where the line was hooked up. But I'm sure that this is all just atonement for some non-specific sin I've committed, and as long as I suffer it in silence (except for long-winded typing) I'll have redeemed myself like Douglas Adams' England.
That's my theory, anyway. And until I come up with a better one, it's what I'll stick to.
Fingers crossed for the damn box being accessible without having to dig up the sidewalk.
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