FUCKING HAD IT WITH COX

[crossover_chick]

Guess what went out AGAIN tonight?! I mean, SERIOUSLY, how fucking often has this happened in the past few months?! I've spent a good chunk of my evening without internet, and now I'm rushing this out because I fully expect it to crap out on me YET AGAIN any second now! It is INFURIATING! Mom thinks it has something to do with that fucking stupid "Gigablast" thing they're rolling out soon -- I don't even fucking care anymore. We're all just about done, and we're going to be talking to the Fios people again tomorrow. Dunno if it'll actually GO anywhere, considering Verizon is probably just as scummy, but it'll make me feel better to know we at least TRIED to get better internet service.

I suppose on the plus side it didn't crap out until I'd gotten a chance to watch The Sim Supply's latest "Get Famous Rags To Riches" set. He's forced Thorne to step out of the spotlight (after a celebrity cleanse to remove all his perks and quirks), made him fat with an insta-large potion (after many failed attempts with grand turkey meals and cakes), and ruined his and Lady's relationship by having her study the Angry emotion via yelling at him. Also he's stuck in the trailer with the twins most of the time, and they cry a LOT. Thorne's probably wondering what the hell he did to deserve this rotten fate. XD Well, you tried to show up James's main character, that's what you did! Lady herself is doing pretty well -- she continues to have very successful gigs, and she's finally earning the big bucks as she's now a top-level actress. James is planning some makeover/rebuilding episodes to make her look like a real star, and get her maybe an actual HOUSE to live in. XD I find it a continual source of amusement that he's so freaking RUTHLESS in most of his Let's Plays. And that two of his most "evil" Sims -- Lady II here and Max Power -- actually have the "Good" trait. Methinks James has a rather twisted idea of what "good" actually is.

I also got a lot of writing done -- before the internet fail, I got another section of Chapter 10 done. A brief minecart ride in the Village of the Doomed -- I thought it would be a fun little activity for Victor and Alice to share. In an actual CART, mind -- none of this lying on a flat surface hanging onto the edges with your fingertips for dear life. Next up is a brief jaunt to Tundraful, before hitting the Deluded Depths! And then, AFTER the net went out, I went ahead and worked on another bit of my Holistic Assassin!Alice AU for tumblr -- I'm super close to wrapping up the few scenes I have left in my head, so I figured, while I had nothing better to do. . . So Victor and Alice have had their grand reunion after being separated for a while, complete with a big damn kiss. :) Only thing left to write is them going off on new adventures! Which includes Ghostbusters jokes because why not?

So yeah, at least I kept busy. Still, would have preferred to have a lot more time to answer comments and set up my queues! At least I'm mostly done with my VictorLuvsAlice Sims 4 update -- drafted the main text of the final part while I was waiting out the outage too. Let me just go around and get all that sorted. . . And hopefully get myself calmed down a bit before I go to bed. *sigh* Night all.

Comments

[whitedove01s]

It seems like all utilities (and I consider phone and internet as utilities, even though they're technically/legally not) have gotten extra scummy of late. At least Frontier admitted they made a mistake - after I sicced the FCC on them!

And we were transferred to them without so much as a 'may we' years ago by Verizon... They were reasonably reliable for telephone, if I remember, but I haven't a clue on their internet as I was still on dial-up with Earthlink at the time.

[crossover_chick]

Hopefully I won't have to go to such extremes with Cox. The sucky thing about where I live is that there's like two companies you can go to for internet service, and neither of them are great. (FIOS being a Verizon thing, which means your surprise switch to an entirely different company from them has got me worried about them now.) I just -- I wish they WOULD classify the net as a utility. It's pretty vital to everyday life these days. Mom mentioned last night that we wouldn't put up with this bullshit from the power company. Though I guess your recent experiences with yours might say otherwise.

[whitedove01s]

The switch-over happened years ago and I think was because Verizon stopped offering service in this area. Still, yes, it was rude of them not to at least warn us. But then pulling stuff like that seems to be what Utility Companies do these days - Frontier not notifying me before sticking changes on my bill that turned out to be because of an error, or the Electric Company switching us from the budget plan we liked to their AMP plan without either asking OR telling us they were doing it, resulting in the current clusterfuck. (Turns out among the OTHER problems with that idiotic plan, it's on a lunar-month billing cycle. Meaning we've already had 12 bills this year, but she's only had 11 Social Security checks. Since almost everyone gets paid on Calendar Months not Lunar Months, I doubt we're the only people they've screwed over with that. I'd personally love it if everything switched to a lunar calendar, but they shouldn't get to ahead of the rest of us.)

So about all I can say with regards to ANY of them these days is:
- ALWAYS read every page of your bill when you get it
- Be suspicious of ANY discrepancies
- Keep either the paper bills, printouts, or saved PDFs somewhere in case you need to go back and look them over (my offline wiki now has a page of saved PDF bills, as well as the paper ones in folders that we scribbled notes on over the year)
- And know who to call and complain to should anyone try to pull something, and have their number and website tucked away in the same place as the bills, just in case.

[crossover_chick]

Ahhh, I see -- and yeah, it really was. And yes, I've seen some of the Electric nonsense. Good luck straightening any of THAT out. (Who the heck bills based on LUNAR months?! How the heck did they even come UP with that idea? *facepalm* I mean, sure, a calendar based on the phases of the moon would probably work better than our current mess, but as you say -- they can't run ahead of everyone else and squeeze out extra money that way. Ugh.)

Yeah, we keep copies of all the bills we receive sorted by month and keep a close watch for weirdness. And we know who to complain to at Cox, at this point -- we've contacted them a LOT over the last year for various issues. *sigh* I guess we'll see where things go from here.

[whitedove01s]

I know, that detail got added to the current BBB report against them. Nobody living paycheck-to-paycheck can do a lunar calendar plan! I wouldn't be surprised if they made some people homeless - and are too stupid to realize that homeless people don't have electric bills and thus that isn't in their best interests either. Whoever is running this company, I suspect they were dropped on their head a few dozen times as a baby.

And I meant in terms of who to complain to when you have to go over the company's heads because they're not solving the problem. Federal Communication Commission (FCC) for phone and internet, and supposedly the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for utilities but the Better Business Bureau has been more effective for us so far with the electric. They basically mediate disputes - you file an informal complaint, the company has 30 days to respond (identical messages to both you and the mediator), and so forth until you mark the situation as resolved. And companies risk investigation and fines if they don't make reasonable attempts to resolve complaints.

The electric company case got closed and reopened at one point already because they said they would call to settle the bill after it came out that taking her off the AMP plan she never asked to be on would leave them owing her almost $200 instead of her owing them $400 (and that's just what they'll admit to, she insists they owe twice that). They didn't call and the website still says she owes the money.

[crossover_chick]

Not until companies start paying on a lunar calendar schedule, anyway. *sigh* And I wouldn't be surprised either, on either count. They're so focused on the extra money they can squeeze out of anyone who can afford this, they're not checking to see if this is a viable long-term plan. Assholes.

Ooooh, I see. . . Should probably keep the FCC and BBB in mind for this situation. So far the net's been behaving, but maybe a complaint to the latter would be helpful if we have another outage. I'm glad they've been helping you with the electric company. . .now you just have to find a good way to force them to pay up sometime this century.