SWITCHING INTENET SERVICE PROVIDERS

Got a problem with your flat screen TV, your DVD recorder, your digital camera, your computer or your internet service provider? If you're like me, you'll dial an 800 number for technical assistance. After selecting the "english or spanish" menu option, you receive unintelligible instructions from a recording for selecting one out of four or five options, then one of three or four more options, and then one of another three or four options. After five or more irritating minutes of trying to figure out the appropriate options and pressing keys on the handset, if you're lucky, you may finally get to talk to a live person, most likely one in India.

A good friend, who has switched internet service providers, tried to find out if her new service would receive messages sent to her previous provider and if it would notify her correspondents of the new e-mail address. Her frustrations were so eloquently expressed, and with a good tinge of humor as well, that I could not resist the urge to include the notification she sent her correspondents in this blog.


Dear To Whom it May Concern:

After indescribable chaos, after garbled communication with a veritable compendium, nay, a veritable United Nations of alleged technicians who vowed on the chastity of their collective mothers that they speak English as a first language (fluently) and whose amassed IQs may rapidly be approaching room temperature, after being switched off-shore to on-shore and back again so often as to require dramamine for seasickness, after explaining patiently a million times how one spells "Kay" and "Bob,"after discussing the concept of the oxymoron by citing as example "Yahoo/Help desk," we have abandoned the valiant fight to have you formally notified by SBC of changes and informally inform you that we do, despite the inadequacies of AT&T in general and their alleged installation disks which do not in any event install, have DSL and new e-mail addresses.

Because TrueSwitch in all honesty cannot inform those in our address book of our new e-mail addresses automatically (their software contains not one but two trojan horses which their technical brilliance cannot circumvent), we have but faint hope that e-mail addressed to our old pdq.net address will come to us as promised for a month or so, and we, personally, send new addresses. Since our optimism is flaccid at this point about AT&T's ability to handle anything as monumental as forwarding, kindly replace old addresses as quickly as your computer allows. Thank you.