Afflicted by Bad Internet Service
Apparently, the technoscape of this poor little island of mine is doomed to face continuous hiccups. My home connection has now been dead the entire weekend with no substantial explanation for why. I’m writing this at the lab, my main medium for information and expression cut in half by what appears to be blatant carelessness.
From what I gather, a majority of my ISP’s customers have been disconnected the entire weekend due to some kind of malfunction at Siminn (proprietor of the entire Icelandic subnet). Again, even this basic information is unverified. Apparently the people who know things are on vacation and the jesters are in control.
For a company that’s literally responsible for providing web access to the entire population, I cannot believe these work tactics. I don’t know if this kind of unexplained disconnectivity is frequent in other countries, but it is driving me mad beyond all reason.
This is analogous to a company having ownership of all TV transmissions, and upon malfunction of this vital information medium the stock reply is “Well, it’s the weekend, y’know, we’re sleeping in. We’ll fix it next monday” … WHAT?! Have you been sleeping for the past 20 years or what?! You can’t procrastinate fixing a medium that connects 1.133 billion people!
So, due to naiveness and irresponsibility of Icelandic internet service providers, my connectivity time is currently being cut in half. This, along with added pressure to focus on school results in a temporary lack of updates here, but hopefully the morons will fix the line soon enough. If you really feel like reading something of mine, check out my guest article on OneMansBlog on How to Throw a Knockout Punch.
End of Rant.
3 Comments, Comment or Ping
John Pozadzides
Uugh. That seriously sucks. I’m not aware of anything like this happening in the US, of course we are all working ourselves to death over here…
I’ve got to think that someone is trying to fix that problem, but perhaps it’s only the incompetent people on staff at the moment.
If your school hadn’t just started again I’d say hop a plane to Dallas and you can work from here with me.
John
Sep 3rd, 2007
cooper
Don’t feel bad. I live in a small city, my internet via comcast is listed as coming from a city twenty miles away. The people two niles to the west of me have their internet wired to a place twenty miles south, and those twenty miles to the south have their internet coming from here. We have had several outages over the last few months - since comcast took over. I think they have their wires crossed somewhere.
Sep 4th, 2007
Hrafn
@John
Usually you get word that things are being fixed, but not this time. The connection is back up now, so I’ve called and cancelled my ticket to Dallas
I managed to pull it out of my ISP what was going on and I was half wrong; it thankfully wasn’t the fault of Iceland’s main owner of the subnet. My ISP, call them ISP1, was switching ISPs (that’s right, two points of articulation), call them ISP2.
So in switching, on friday, ISP1 apparently didn’t take into account the fact that ISP2 closed at midnight, sending all its tech staff home for the weekend. ISP1 needed ISP2 to finalize the transition, and hence ISP1s customers were stuck with no connection and no one trying to fix it for the entire weekend!
I can see two possible reasons for this fiasco: Either ISP1 forgot to take into account that ISP2 would close, which points to incompetence on their behalf. Or, ISP2 led them to believe they’d be available to make the transition but went ahead and closed anyway, which points to utter unprofessionalism.
In either case, I’m just glad the connection is back up. But I’m going to take some action to minimalize the possibility of this happening again. This is actually the second time in less than six months that there’s been an extended period of disconnectivity.
@cooper
Argh, that doesn’t make me feel better! That makes me feel bad for you! I know that the connection back here is definitely not the worst in the world, and I’m thankful for that. But it’s still annoying when things go wrong. Thanks for trying to cheer me up
Sep 4th, 2007
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