Endgame

Started: 2004-12-17 22:31:19

Submitted: 2004-12-17 22:43:41

Visibility: World-readable

Time is running out for Kiesa and I in the Temple of Castor and Pollux. Within forty-eight hours we will be in our new house in all its glory, which will be greatly exciting. Tomorrow we're going to pack and pick up the U-Haul truck, and on Sunday we move, thanks to a small army descending upon the Temple at 1100 MST.

Unfortunately, it looks like my brilliant schemes to get DSL might fall through after all. Despite Speakeasy telling me that my new address was DSL-capable, and Covad accepting Speakeasy's order, I spotted the following entry in my up-to-the-minute status (dated noon yesterday):

We regret to inform you that this end user does not qualify for our Shared Line service. The existing phone line/lines do not meet our qualification standards due to Pair Gain being present. Unfortunately we must cancel this order. If your end user would still like to obtain DSL service he/she may qualify for our TeleSpeed 144 or 2nd line ADSL service. However, a new order will need to be placed within our system. We apologize for the inconvenience.

(I'm the "end user", and "Pair Gain" means Qwest (US West, when the neighborhood was built in 1997) set up a box in my neighborhood to consolidate the phone lines that isn't capable of hosting DSL. Covad's message seems to imply that a new line might give me a copper pair straight to the central office so I could get DSL... or maybe I'm just reading too much into it.)

It doesn't take a super-genius to get the idea that I'm a bit frustrated with this turn of events. I thought I was going to write a changelog warning my loyal readers that Ivanova would be offline (and reappearing with a new IP) in the near future; instead, I'm writing a changelog warning that the same will happen in the more distant future, once I get details hammered out between Speakeasy, Qwest, Covad, and maybe one or more entities. *sigh*

In unrelated news, through a combination of vacation time, holidays, and a "floating holiday", I get to leave work at noon on Wednesday and not return until 2005. That will be nice, although I'll confess I would have preferred taking Monday off so I can unpack, which our schedule won't allow.