Yes – My intent is to trash talk this horrible company and badly as possible. I have no reason to be nice here. They need some straight-talk and to be put in line. If you’re reading this from CenturyLink – don’t take it personally, don’t even think I dislike YOU. Take it corporately. I’m sure there’s some good people at this company, but the vast majority are idiots, and if you’re at CenturyLink right now, you probably know in your heart it’s true. You’ve probably wondered how you ended up working with such morons. Sorry to refer to your colleagues in such a degrading way, but somebody has got to speak out. THIS IS UMPITYGRUMPITY AFTERALL. And I’m about to speak my mind.

First of all – really? I spoke with the supposed regional manager for eastern Washington’s CenturyLink network during my time of CenturyLink DSL frustration, and you know what he told me after not fixing the problem, but making the techs “look into it” more? He basically gave me a guilt-trip for speaking my mind on my blog and used the word “harsh” in referring to my words about CenturyLink. Well duh – they’re harsh, because that’s the perception I’ve had of their customer service. When a product doesn’t work right, and it doesn’t get fixed..and then it’s given up on, that’s harsh!

Now that it’s 2011 we know that 1.5 mbit/sec in some parts of the Methow Valley is STILL all that they offer (when just down the street they have FIBER OPTIC!), and my friends pay more for that than my parents were paying for 10mbit/sec. Heck more than I pay for 20mbit/sec! We know that their service is already ridiculously overpriced, but to top that off, guess what? Yep. Their service severely sucks. We tried working together with CenturyLink’s customer service guys who were on task with my situation to resolve the same issues with some friends of mine. You know what happened? Nothing. No, not even a call. No visit. Nothing. Every time these friends would try to call tech support, they would get told the same thing: Reset your modem to defaults, reboot your machine, everything is working on “our” end. Seriously!? This is unacceptable!

At some point in this post I have to say things like CenturyStink and CenturySmell, and CenturyPoo, and really get those key words ingrained so that when they search for blogs about them, they’ll see that we’re not happy.

With that said, we will drop a link to the post that they made me oblige to write …which I updated with a comment detailing how they CenturyFailed. http://www.umpitygrumpity.com/centurytel-comes-through/comment-page-1/#comment-10358

We were not the only ones with a typical home network setup with CenturyLink who had daily disconnects almost hourly. Their service plain sucks and there is no getting around that. They can’t fix it either. They’ve tried. They had it “looked into” with several techs. Several higher-ups have looked into it and still blamed one dumb thing after another on us. Oh, the wiring in the house must be bad? OK – I replaced the entire wiring with brand new CAT5 straight from the demarc to the jack with the DSL modem and nothing else connected to the line whatsoever. So it’s still broken. What now? Oh, it’s because we have VOIP phones. Really? What kind of morons suggest that internet service gets dropped because of standard TCP/IP devices? Internet is what they run on!! Not break. Idiots.

Now come to find out CenturyWhore is buying up a semi-decent phone/internet company – Qwest. Why does this piss me off? Because I have Qwest internet and have been happy with it for months. Now it’s going to be subject to the same CenturyClank corner-cutting and terrible network management as the rest of the CenturyLink infrastructure. OH NO YOU DIDN’T.

CenturyLink, if you think for one second that I’m going to be licking your boots to stay a customer of QwuitLink FailNet, you’ve got another thing coming. Since I heard the news, I’ve already been looking elsewhere for internet. I’m leaning towards Verizon FIOS or maybe just the new AT&T 4G wireless data when it comes out.

Now that I’ve ripped these guys a new one, I’d like to know what they can come up with as far as web propaganda that makes it sound like they actually care.

Trust me, I wouldn’t have felt as compelled to write this, if they wouldn’t have made me feel obliged to write up a “they came through” post and then turn around and still fail in every way. What am I supposed to do? Write up an article redeeming them and leave it up even though technically they didn’t come through at all????? You can do the math as well as I can.

CenturyLink, you can leave and make your crappy internet monopoly go away with ya. I’m a savvy consumer, and I am not going to put up with your corporate bureaucratic BS. This is my CenturyLink rebuttal!

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It’s almost without fail…haha, that when I play music with WMP, at some point it stops working…(I might actually think it’s closed too), and begins to chew up CPU and RAM like there’s some kind of famine going on. If I’m not careful, and check the task manager (tsk tsk manager), and the WiMP has only decided to take up SOME of the CPU, then it sits there in the background forever until I realize there’s something slow.

Seriously? Does it have to act this retarded? Geeze. I don’t even have any special plugins or custom settings on it. I’ve just freshly installed Windows 7 only a couple of months ago.

Anyhow….it certainly IS a Windows Media Failure, which is why I nearly never use it anymore, and when I do, I’m reminded why I try not to. This is why I actually un-installed the stupid thing before I re-installed Windows. I’m actually considering doing it again.

So Google, can you fix your browser? Don’t tell me it’s my fault… don’t tell me my comp has some kind of virus. That’s bull crap and we know it, because I keep my comp spotless from that junk and I know because everybody getting viruses has all sorts of antivirus apps and anti malware apps, and I don’t use but one, along with virustotal.com.

If it’s anything to do with my computer, then it’s got to be due to a flaw or something overlooked with standard compatibility within the browser related to the hardware I run on. I have a pretty typical setup, but you can’t blame it on software. It was doing this back when I was running a fresh install of XP, then the same thing on Vista…now a fresh install of Windows 7 and it is STILL wacko!

Get it friggin together Google!

I believed the background streaming feature broke the very day I upgraded the app to the newest version, but after emailing their support, they told me that they’ve never heard of it doing that.

I scoured for endless hours on the internet for a solution to this problem and found nothing…. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. I couldn’t believe it. Something so insidious…just sitting there laughing at my every effort to fix it.

I tried a lot of different things, but in the end, the whole reason it wouldn’t play any audio in my safari browser anymore, was (unknowingly) the iPhone Safari setting (Settings->Safari) had been switched to OFF. Once I switched it to on, the feature immediately began to work again.

I hope that if any other soul out there had this issue, that some how my blog post could help them. I’ve been living with this for months now. Today I just couldn’t take it anymore, and that’s when it dawned on me to try looking for a Safari setting.

Well, I told somebody about my gripes and rantings on my blog here, and I just realized they would have to dig through to find them because all of my more recent blogs were actually trying to be rather up beat.

So I present to you, … another rant about CenturyLink (yes, they changed their name). I had my pet(or pet-peeved) name for CenturyTel, it was CenturySmell. Then they recently changed it to CenturyLink, which I of course call CenturyStink.

Am I serious about my disdain for this company? Oh you bet I am. The company royally screwed over my parents. They took something like 6 months before they FINALLY ported his business phone numbers out to our new phone service. In the process they cost him hundreds or maybe thousands of dollars.

I have my own complaints about the company too. They have their own stupid mini-contracts that they never tell you about. I got DSL internet a few years ago on my own phone line, then when I moved, I couldn’t just switch the service to my new location, they had to charge me a cancellation fee…which I couldn’t pay, and I didn’t need the internet at the new place anyway, so I was really wanting to just drop them, but nooooo, they had to tell me I was under a contract and had to pay an early termination fee to cancel it early. Eventually I got the family there to take over the service, so I got out of it. Still, they have no right to act like a freaking cell phone company.

On the list of other dings on CenturyStink’s record, are CRAPPY internet, TERRIBLE customer service, and non-existant repair. They sell us an internet speed of 10megabits/second, and they don’t even bother to pro-rate it when their stupid techs bump it all the way down to 3.5mbit/sec so they can supposedly “fix the disconnects”. They didn’t FIX it… they made it WORSE. It disconnects nearly 30 times a day, or else at least acts completely retarded 30 times or more a day. They always say we’re the only ones having this problem, and that it is probably because we’re so far out from their office, which is …what,…a MILE exactly maybe? Golly… if they can’t make 3.5 megabit/sec work without problems just 1 mile away, I wonder what it’s like right in their office…probably 40% uptime!

I know we’re not the only ones with crappy DSL service from them. They also refuse to come out and look at the situation anymore. They figure they replace the modem (which doesn’t fix anything). They come in and make sure that the “Auto-Reconnect” feature is turned on, and that’s it…. now they don’t even come out.

Tell me CenturyStink… if we’re the only ones with this problem, then you obviously have the time to come and look at our issue and fix it right? Except they don’t know HOW to fix it, because they’re not as bright as they claim to be. I hate living out here where there’s no quality options for things like internet. I’m going to move elsewhere as soon as I can!

When I found that there was a script included within the AUTOHOTKEY help files that did the very same thing only better..I instantly loved it! I can now customize any part of it even, since it’s an AUTOHOTKEY script. I’m remapping the keys so that I use the Caps Lock key instead of the Scroll Lock to activate the mouse keys. Also to use the right hand of the “home row” as the basis of my mouse keys. Now I can stay at the home row and still be productive in the GUI portion of Windows.

WOOT.

So if it breaks…I’ll just say goodbye to a blog and start something new. Here goes..

I mean, geeze, for once i finally had a niche… work that paid me $50/hour for my technical services, and could finally get a fair amount of hours during the week. Then BAM! Hit like a ton of bricks, it dwindled down to only a couple of lonely hours a week if that. I was making plans to get Dell certified in every certification there is. Making plans to start training other techs. This has got to be a shift to something much better….. because if it’s not, then I think I’m gonna be upset that all my efforts are not getting me anywhere.

Do we all need to band together in order to make it? Do we need each other? Could it be, that without being around one another, our dreams have no real chance? That our lives aren’t enriched or our skills and senses sharpened? Maybe that’s just an illusion and grasping for some kind of solution that isn’t there, or perhaps that’s just it. Maybe the answer is this thing that we practically loathe because we like our privacy, and live on competition breathing through our lungs, and get irritated with others that we get familiar with.

I don’t know how I could have made it these last months during the past year or so without my family. I very much have felt frustrated and hurt and angry with all of them over the course of it all, but if I had abandoned them to escape to my own devices, I would probably be much much worse for it. They’ve grown sharper and more tolerable, and I’ve also grown sharper by their input and care. I’m sure we’re all better now that this has happened.

Maybe what this shows us, is that adversity is a necessary ingredient to character development, but not only enhances our own character, but those who bring the adversity as well. I suppose we could be reflecting back a bit of adversity to them when they bring it, so there they have some for themselves.

It’s often we find that by our own observation, they (people) are not and cannot be growing in any way but for the negative and worse. Take heart; first the thorny prickles grow…. then the rose bud!