Wednesday, October 25, 2017

internet fiasco and aftermath

When my Net service went out last Wednesday, I spoke with my building's lobby guard/concierge about what to do, and he said I'd need to talk to whichever company was supplying the connection. I went back, checked my modem, and discovered it was a KT/Tellion device. As I may have blogged before, finding the customer-service contact was impossible: the phone number listed on the modem's underside was no longer in service, and the same was true for the phone number listed on the Tellion website. KT, which is a huge telecom company, has its own customer-service number somewhere, but the company makes that number devilishly hard to find via online search (shades of Amazon.com, which also doesn't like it when customers try to phone in).

So I did what a coworker of mine did and contacted my own company's HR department. I was told that someone would be sent out on Monday. Monday morning, around 10AM, I emailed HR to ask when the repairman would arrive, as I hoped to leave my place by 11AM (I get to work late, and I stay late, but I always put in my nine* hours). HR replied that the repairman would be by around 11AM, so please wait. I waited... and waited... and waited. Three fucking hours later, I emailed HR to say I wouldn't be waiting any longer and would go to work. HR said they had heard that the repairman had come by. I testily responded that I had been in my place all day, wasting my time, and no one had come by. Eventually, it turned out that HR had dispatched a repairman to Ilsan—a completely different city—because the HR staffer with whom I'd been talking had somehow thought I was a Kevin who worked at my company's Ilsan branch. Profuse apologies followed; I tiredly replied that it was okay because it was Monday, and we all hate Mondays. HR said they would reschedule a visit ASAP.

End result: when I got back to my place around 2AM Tuesday morning (I had stayed at my office very late because I had arrived very late after having wasted 3.5 hours waiting for the repairman), I saw that items on my desk had been moved, which meant that someone had been in my place. I immediately deduced that the repairman had come by and restored Net service (I had given my apartment's pass code to HR; they doubtless relayed that code to the repairman), which turned out to be the correct surmise. As happened with my coworker, my ancient modem had been switched out with a newer one, which is also a KT/Tellion modem, so I guess Tellion, as a company, still exists. Given the outdated phone number and un-updated website, I had assumed that Tellion had disappeared.

For what it's worth, I'm back in business and no longer obliged to perform all my personal online activity at the office. I did, however, enjoy using my office's super-fast Net connection and extra-large monitors to watch the remainder of Season 7 of "Game of Thrones." Now, the only worry I have is a remark that the repairman made to HR regarding my laptop: the repairman thinks it may have a virus or some other problem. I'm pretty sure it's not a virus, given that this is a Mac (I know: Macs can get viruses, too, but only rarely), but I do know there's something wrong with my computer, given the quirky way in which its low-capacity internal drive fills up so easily with data. If there were a Mac Genius Bar somewhere nearby, I'd schedule an appointment for my machine, but since there isn't, I'm probably not going to do much of anything for the nonce.



*That's eight hours of work plus an hour for lunch.



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