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!

Now I’m not talking about just making stuff crash or not work.  I’m talking about full blown serious issues…not being able to boot!  I would see the iPhone show the Apple logo and then about 5 seconds later it would just shut off again.  Even more serious was that when I put the phone into DFU (Device Firmware Update) Mode, it would fail when trying to restore the firmware to factory settings.

It’s funny thinking about the way this all happened.  It seemed so innocuous…so innocent.  I was working with it just fine.  Then I was prompted by somebody to enter their phone number quickly into my phone for safe-keeping.  I entered it into my SBSettings Fast Notes as I do a lot of things when I want to jot something down super quick.  When I thought I’d just leave the fast notes open and hit the sleep button, I didn’t realize that the darn thing would leave the on-screen keyboard up!  This was a big problem….I couldn’t use the phone any longer since the stupid keyboard blocked my view of the unlock slider!

What I ended up doing made my heart sink with what happened next.  I went to go shut it off….slid my finger across the screen to confirm shut-off…and waited.  Then when I turned it on again, it wouldn’t boot.  I got the results described above.  At first it seemed I had messed it up by shutting it down with that keyboard still up…but that really doesn’t make any sense.  After looking online for a solution to my problem, I found it was a huge issue due to a recent Rock update.  Great…the one I had installed.  The one that seemed to be working just fine.  But I hadn’t actually powered the phone down and up again until this moment.

So what did I do to fix it?  I tried a LOT of things.  Took me a couple of hours to finally get it sorted out to where I could restore the thing.  Of course restoring it was a last resort to me because I didn’t want to lose my files, and restoring all my apps and settings is a pain.  I had to try everything I could find before deciding that I should just restore it.

First I remember trying to use the iH8Sn0w iREB v3.1-2 for Windows.  First I thought I’d try the Recovery Boot Loop fix…which all it did after I got the libUSB installed and clicked the button for my iPhone 3G was reboot and still shut off.  Then I tried the actual iREB app and clicked my 3G iPhone button, and it didn’t appear to do anything.  Then I downloaded and tried iRecovery for Windows.  At first I thought it failed, but then I read the README.TXT file which said it was supposed to be run from a command prompt window.

iRecovery had two options.  To upload a file, or to start up a shell.  So I started up a shell.  The shell might have been able to do something to fix the darn thing, but I don’t know enough about doing that stuff.  I had tried to use some commands that I found online:

setenv auto-boot true
saveenv
fsboot

Doing this didn’t seem to do anything, but I’m thinking it may have contributed to making the restore work.  After those commands I typed in the “reboot” command and watched it reboot and then shut off.  So at that point I decided to try a restore again, which also failed.  Then…this might be the only thing which was necessary: I rebooted the phone into Recovery mode & was able to restore a custom firmware file to the phone. For those who don’t know… Recovery mode is entered when you boot the phone like so: press and hold both the Home button AND the sleep button for about 12-13 seconds…then while still holding the Home button, release the sleep button once the image on the screen pops up, – still hold the Home button about 10 seconds until iTunes says that there’s been an iPhone detected in recovery mode.

Also for those who don’t know, you can download a custom firmware file to your iPhone by SHIFT-CLICKING the Restore button in iTunes (that’s holding down the shift key while left-clicking).

A fair warning which many would already know if they jailbroke their iPhone, but worth mentioning: DO NOT update to the latest official Apple iPhone firmware (3.1.3).  It contains no new features, and nothing was done to it that is worth updating.  If you like your iPhone jailbroken as I do, then do yourself a favor and pay attention and special care to NEVER update the iPhone to that version.  A friend of mine did it by accident and he cannot jailbreak his phone anymore.

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!

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!