I’ve now had TekSavvy service for nearly a week, after 5 days of wrangling with Rogers to release my line.  I’m not sure if Rogers managed to fix their issues of their own accord, or with some pushing from my wife’s friend who started making waves from inside, but my cable modem was finally freed to link to Tek.

The numbers were great.

There was an immediate improvement of 7 MB/sec in download speed.  Netflix was even more a pleasure to watch than usual, and with Tek’s top plan there are no bandwidth charges, so we’re watching as much as we want, whenever we want.  No worries.

It’s the honeymoon phase and I’m sure there will be occasional rough patches ahead, but I’d still rather deal with Tek’s customer service reps any day of the week. A great experience.

I filed a ticket with Rogers via TekSavvy explaining the problem. Rogers responded 45 hours later—just within their 48 hour deadline—explaining that there was no problem and service should be working normally.  I conducted a full shutdown of my cable modem and computer, waited 5 minutes, then restarted my system to discover that I was still being assigned a Rogers IP address.

TekSavvy looked into the issue and discovered that somehow Rogers had interrupted service at the wrong address. No, not over confusion over non-existent apartments  within my house, which Rogers had earlier used to explain why I couldn’t receive service from TekSavvy.  No…  This time they managed to disconnect the Internet service of a total stranger, whose address is completely different from mine.

The remedy?  Another carefully worded ticket, fully but simply explaining what they’d done wrong in fixing their problem.  ETA to solution?  Another 24-48 hours.  Meanwhile, some other Rogers customer is without service because their line was inexplicably cut.

At this point I fully expect to wake up tomorrow morning (after the 48 hour deadline), reset all my equipment, and continue to find that the Rogers Denial Of Service attack (a.k.a. Online Modem Activation) is continuing to latch onto my new cable mode, blocking my TekSavvy Service.

It’s hard to blame TekSavvy for all of this. Their Customer Service Reps have varied from good to excellent, but because their company is a wholesale reseller of Internet service over Rogers own lines they are limited by what Rogers does (or fails to do).  The ridiculously poor service and incompetent, careless mistakes that have left me without home Internet for nearly a week now are as a result of Rogers not treating TekSavvy like a valued customer.  Sad, but it’s not hard to understand why that might be the case.

Rogers would obviously prefer not to have to allow for competition by leasing out its lines to small competitors.  But as the local monopoly, there isn’t a lot of room to move in and create competition without this reselling provision.  How motivated is Rogers to provide their own competitor with top-drawer service?

Let’s face it, the average consumer would be livid with TekSavvy after this experience, assuming that the problem lies with them.

Rogers, as I see it, is either guilty of gross incompetence or gross indifference that borders on anti-competitive behaviour.  They are either poorly staffed or poorly trained in their customer service and tech support department, or they are providing the poorest support possible to resellers like TekSavvy.

Which is it? Both, perhaps? Is one masquerading as the other? Five days in, after having explained the same situation to a dozen tech support personnel and enduring multiple “mandatory waiting periods”, it’s hard not to assume the worst about my ex-provider.  Incompetence is, after all, not a crime. Nor is poor customer service…  but how does it affect the customer when the customer also happens to be a competitor of the dominant company?

Let’s see if they’ve released my line to TekSavvy by tomorrow morning.

Saturday was my cancellation date with Rogers. Why I should owe 30 days notice to a corporation is anyone’s guess, but the Rogers service agreement is a wishlist come true that you’re obliged to sign to get service.  I returned my cable modem, received a receipt as proof of same, and was notified that my connection to the service had been completely wiped from their system leaving me free to connect another ISP (in this case, TekSavvy, who provides their service on Rogers’ own lines).

I returned home and installed my new cable modem. It connected instantly—to Rogers’ Online Modem Configuration tool. Even though I had cancelled service, Rogers’ network was still attempting to provide high speed Internet using my new modem. It recognized that it wasn’t a Rogers modem, and served me a webpage explaining how to call Rogers Technical Support.

Trying to reach the correct department proved challenging. Because Rogers’ voice menu support system is tied to your account, it only provides contact options that match the services you are subscribed to. Because I was no longer a High Speed subscriber, there was no way to reach their Internet tech support, not without talking to the first person who answered and requesting that they transfer me to the correct department.

In all, I spoke to 5 Rogers Tech Support personnel on Saturday. The most technical piece of  tech support I received was from the 5th person, who insisted I must be seeing a cached page in my browser and that I should clear my cache. When I told him I’d already done so he directed me to call TekSavvy, insisting the problem was at their end. There was no acknowledgement, let alone explanation, as to why Rogers networks was still intercepting Internet traffic along a line that they were no longer providing Internet service to.

TekSavvy was a pleasure to work with. I was notified that while work orders for service changes went out every 30 minutes, technically Rogers had until 11:59:59 p.m. to release my cable line, despite the fact that I was no longer their customer and they’d confirmed receipt of my equipment.  So I waited, disconnecting and reconnecting the cable line, powering down and reinitializing my router about every hour, clearing my cache, rebooting my computer, trying from three different computers and 3 different operating systems.

Midnight came and went and Rogers’ network had still latched one of their IP addresses to my cable modem.

I called TekSavvy back and we spent an hour doing the required system checks to establish that the problem was not my fault. Despite this, I was required to accept Rogers Terms and Conditions for filing a ticket against them, agreeing that I would pay $99 if they determined that the problem was my fault. I agreed.  Sadly, I can’t charge Rogers $99 for tying up my line and consuming hours of self-provided technical support and line testing. Nor can I charge them for denying me Internet service which I’ve been paying for since Saturday morning.

It’s Monday morning now. Rogers is still intercepting Internet traffic on my cable line, trying to attach itself to my router, and preventing me from getting the service I’m already paying for through TekSavvy.

Any guilt or concern I had about the title of my previous post (Rogers: If We Can’t Have You, No-One Can) is gone. They really do make themselves difficult to leave, and make it difficult to start a new relationship with a competitor. I’ve kicked them out, and yet they won’t stop entering my house. I confront them directly with the evidence  and they deny that they’re still trying to come into my home, and yet, every time I switch on my modem—there they are.

If Rogers was a person, I’d be petitioning for a restraining order right now.

Really though, my expectations are lower and more reasonable:

• Acknowledge that there is a problem, and that it seems to be your fault.
• If you can’t help me, direct me to someone who can.

Rogers CSR denial, fingerpointing, and unwillingness to help solve the problem makes me feel like they’re the injured party. I’m not their customer anymore, so I’m not their problem.  But I am their customer.  Rogers is still providing my cable television service.

For now.

I arrived home tonight to both a voicemail and an e-mail from TekSavvy. The e-mail is titled “Rejected Cable Order: Attention Required”. I shook my head. I paid by debit so I know the money was good. TekSavvy’s own website verified that the service was available in my area, and in any case it runs on Rogers’ own cable network. So what’s the deal?

Sadly, Rogers is in charge of installing my TekSavvy service and Rogers’ support claimed that my house had been subdivided into many small apartments and they could not arrange the installation of Tek’s service without specifying which apartment.

Truth: This house was, at one time, subdivided into many illegal apartments.

However: The City of Ottawa put a stop to it 5 years ago, prior to us buying the house. It was converted back, and Rogers has been our service provider for the entire time we’ve lived here at the “restored” address.

I suppose I should feel fortunate that it only took ~40 minutes of cross-debate between me, Tek and Rogers to establish that service could be installed at a single address… and I only had to provide my account number to prove that Rogers had already been billing me at this address for the last 5 years.

So, I’ll be getting my service after all, and I only had to prove my own existence to do it.

P.S. for TekSavvy: A less threatening, more descriptive email notification would be appreciated.

UPDATE: Tek is again reporting that Rogers is still confused over the “multiple units” issue, and that an in-person look at the house may be needed to verify it’s not an apartment. They’ve sent another email to Rogers explaining that the house was converted back many years ago. They will update me again within 48 hours.

The only thing missing from this experience is “Hotel California” as the theme music.

They resorted to the usual fear-mongering, trying to make me doubt the speed and reliability of the new service, despite the fact that Teksavvy provides its high speed Internet over Rogers’ own lines.

I tweeted a complaint to @RogersHelps, which was completely ignored. Given the lack of interest from their live support, I’m not surprised, really. For immediate action, I suppose I should have tweeted to @Rogers_Sucks instead.

So it’s goodbye, and I’m getting Teksavvy’s unlimited bandwidth plan for less than I was paying for Rogers’ midrange plan.

I’ll keep you posted, but based on the feedback I’ve received from friends and colleagues, I’ll be recommending that you do likewise.

~$ cd /etc/kde4/kdm
~$ sudo kate kdmrc

Search for the [Shutdown] section, and make sure the shutdown and reboot lines aren’t commented out with ‘#’ hashes. Add (or uncomment) these commands.

HaltCmd=/sbin/shutdown -h -P now

RebootCmd=/sbin/shutdown -r now

• Inexplicably, several apps were uninstalled including GIMP and Wine. Easily remedied.
• This weird error message proved more difficult to fix:

dpkg: warning: parsing file '/var/lib/dpkg/available' near line 20544
package 'handbrake-gtk':
error in Version string 'svn3834ppa1~maverick1':
version number does not start with digit

Very odd because handbrake-gtk wasn’t installed on the system at the time of the upgrade. It was installed via a PPA some months ago, then deleted, and I thought I had wiped all traces of it away… Apparently not.

I tried a bunch of solutions from various forums until I hit on this one which worked:

sudo dpkg --clear-avail && sudo apt-get update

All in all, one of the smoothest upgrades I’ve had with Kubuntu (I always do it during beta; I’m too impatient to wait for the release to mature).  And KDE (now version 4.6.2) just gets more gorgeous with every incarnation.  Be sure to invite your friends over for a look, so they can see what the next version of Windows will be stealing.

Happy hacking.

However… I’ve been a privacy analyst for nearly four years and Facebook shows no immediate symptoms of becoming the next MySpace… so it seemed prudent to acquire a second account, devoid of any useful personal data, purely to keep tabs on the site’s policies and practices.

Today I received this: a warning in my margin that my Account Protection was inadequate. “Nice,” I thought. “Perhaps they’re really taking a more pro-active approach to privacy and security.  Maybe they’ve determined that most users aren’t aware of or don’t know how to access the correct panel to tweak their settings.”

Honestly, no sarcasm here.  I really did hold out hope that this was a legitimate, automated protection mechanism and I was being guided to a process that would be for my benefit.

Instead, I saw this:

Question: How will providing Facebook with additional e-mail addresses (Step 1) make my account more secure?  I had assumed that this action was intended for security: after all, they presented this “protection” warning to me next to an icon of a big brass padlock. I guess this is to suggest that I may become locked out of my own account?

And if you look at Step 2, Facebook would like a phone number.  More specifically, they’d like me to give them my mobile number.  Why?  Well if you’ve been reading the news recently, it’s because they’d like to provide that information to third parties.

Step 3: If all else fails, Facebook is willing to settle for the well-worn security questions… hopefully ones that don’t rely on common information that others know, or could easily guess, as happened to Ms. Palin not long ago.

Nothing about this warning feels genuine. Honestly, it feels predatory. Facebook, if you’re concerned about my account:

• Ask me to create better security questions.
• Prompt me to create a more complex alphanumeric password (preferably with upper and lowercase letters), and perhaps even to change it periodically.
• Guide me to the page that shows me how my profile page is viewable by the public, or logged-in users who are not my friends.  Then, offer me a link at the bottom so I can edit it to my satisfaction.

Blogging about blogging. How meta can you get?

Not long ago, I made the acquaintance of a young, energized public servant.  I was impressed by their¹ enthusiasm, imagination, expression and boundless drive to create.  I encouraged this person to start their own blog and share their ideas with their colleagues at large.  To my delight, my challenge was accepted and the resulting material was as good as I’d hoped: a wellspring of inspiration and discussion.

Then, one day, it all disappeared.  Because of strong divided opinions within their shop about external social media engagement, my colleague had deleted their entire blog—without backing up any of the material.

I was saddened, but not surprised.  I’d experienced a similar crisis at the beginning of my own public service career.  There wasn’t a heated internal debate, nor any direct warnings from supervisors about the content of my writing.  In fact, the awareness of social media within my division was only just beginning.

What I did experience, from orientation sessions and interactions with new colleagues, was the subtle and constant reminder that I was a public servant now.  As a government employee, my life was at greater risk of coming under the microscope.  Everything I said and did, everything I wrote, my personal and professional life—it all needed to be more carefully groomed and diligently managed.  Don’t wear your ID off-site, don’t publicly discuss any issues that are unfavourable to the Government, don’t broadcast strong opinions that could be interpreted as partisanship, and absolutely do not speak to the media.  By extension, I interpreted that as a cue to try and erase anything I might have produced that might fall outside the lines of generic male public servant.  For expediency’s sake I just deleted everything.  Some of it I’d backed up, some of it was lost forever.  The next morning the sun still rose and the stock market didn’t crash, nor did Doctor Who arrive in the TARDIS to shake a stern finger in my face and lecture me about compromising the future of Earth history.  All considered, I take this as an indication that I must have retained the good material.

I reverted to homogenized anonymity, and all was well.

Then, in August 2009 I discovered² GCPEDIA, and it was really hard not to notice the number of employees who were openly blogging or tweeting.  Furthermore, they had the brazen audacity to actually add themselves to lists, where other rabble-rousers had already neatly organized themselves into snappy little tables, complete with links to their potentially offending material.  Egads I was inspired!

Nearly instantly, intoxicated by equal parts of  “Hey! She’s doing it! Why can’t I?” and “Ha ha!  They can’t fire us all!” I launched a Twitter account of my own and embarked on this little blog for good measure.

Fourteen months along I can honestly say, its been almost universally beneficial to my career.  Here’s why you should start a blog (and/or a Twitter account) of your own:

1. You can’t distinguish yourself if hardly anyone knows you exist

You have career aspirations; we all do.  But how can you differentiate yourself from the other 250 candidates in the resume pile?  How can you make sure that your resume remains filed on or near the top?  Don’t be anonymous.

There’s a reason that successful people have PR representatives.  For one thing, they can afford it, but for another it helps to keep them in the public consciousness.  But fear not!—less successful and less wealthy people like you and I have the option of  “promoting” ourselves by creating something publicly accessible (a blog or a Twitter account) and widely useful (insightful commentary, instructional articles, great links).

While I started working for the Government of Canada in May 2007, for all intents and purposes I don’t feel like really existed here until August 28, 2008.  After that day, I started meeting dozens, then hundreds of other publics servants.  My definition of public service changed significantly with the realization that my engagement with my own colleagues through the GC’s Web 2.0 toolkit and these external channels could be beneficial to Canadians as a whole… and a part of my job.

I am no longer anonymous, and that’s a good thing.

2. Increasing your personal network beyond your physical workspace

In an ideal world, I’d exist independently of the space-time continuum. I don’t want to be limited by the number of hours in the day and the number of people I’m in close proximity to.  With social media, I don’t have to be.  Now I can benefit from the experiences of people from everywhere in my government, or any government. They know the things I haven’t learned yet; they’ve read the things I haven’t found the time to search for; they’ve discovered the things I never believed even existed.

Now, unlike before, I know who to contact when I need something, and people know they can contact me for what I can provide.  My blog and Twitter accounts have transmogrified³ my voice mail and e-mail and Twitter DM boxes into conduits of opportunity: expertise inquiries, project collaborations, membership invitations, career opportunities, social gatherings, speaking engagements, training requests…  I help others in the ways I am able, and in return I’ve reaped great rewards from the enormous knowledge base, expertise, and connections of my network of colleagues.

For example:

• How many Directors (or higher) did you meet this year?  How many of them made a point to make your acquaintance because someone else had told them about you?  How many of them phoned or emailed you for advice?  Until my blog, my answer to these questions was “zero”.
• I had four job interview opportunities referred to me in 2010.  Sadly, it wasn’t a great year to change jobs: a lot of positions ended up being eliminated through attrition, including some of the jobs that I interviewed for.  However, one great interview I had resulted in another invitation to another interview.  I owe all of this to people who knew about a job, thought of me, and made an introduction happen between me and someone who wanted to talk to me.
• My network of colleagues (and their emails, voice mails, and requests) created such external buzz about me that it created internal buzz in my own space. My Directorate actually became excited about the use of tools like GCPEDIA and GCconnex, not because of my internal cheerleading, but because other Departments were requesting my assistance.

3. Improving your engagement with your job

Social media’s greatest hurdle in the workplace is the perception that is has no business use because  engagement is a distraction from real work.  There’s that fear that people will spend all day watching stuff like  Charlie Bit My Finger (cute) or Man vs. Bear (funny).  In fact, the opposite is true.

Disengagement leads to distraction and boredom, which fertilizes the ground for the rapid spread of unproductive behaviours: idle websurfing, personal emailing, listening to soft rock commercial-free favourites, and those persistent, longing, ever-so-realistic daydreams about… well, never you mind that!

• Real disengagement happens when a person is rarely challenged by their work, because they are employed in a position that only taps a minute subset of their overall potential.
• Real waste in the workplace happens when people with valuable skills and knowledge remain unknown and unconnected to people who could greatly benefit from their resources.
• Real harm to productivity occurs when people don’t know who to call when they’ve encountered a problem they can’t solve, but may be too embarrassed to look for help within their immediate group for fear of appearing incompetent.

Creating an extended web of expertise where your skillset becomes known to others and their strengths become known to you can go a long way to re-establishing your sense of connectedness with your workplace, your job, your real purpose. That web exists already: you just need to begin weaving yourself into it.

Whatever happened to my friend?  For now, “blogging is still out of the question” in their shop.  But you?  I really think you should climb on board.  Write what you know.  Avoid the controversial and focus on the helpful.

Twitter (technically a microblog, but also called a status update service) is a low hurdle to get you started quickly—anyone can share useful information in a sentence or two.  Start there, then explore Blogger, Posterous, Tumblr, or WordPress to begin sharing even more content.

__________
1 – Indeed, I’m using “their” to refer to a single person in order to avoid disclosing gender. While this may make grammatical purists boil in their own fluids, my I won’t resort to the male-as-normative “generic he” nor the cumbersome “his or her”. My prose is cumbersome enough, thanks.
2 – Well, “crashed it” would be a more fair description, I suppose.  Because I had administrative experience with GCPEDIA’s system software I was promoted from user to Administrator in less than two weeks.  Not long ago, Thom Kearney told me that he still speaks about this as an example of what’s possible, to inspire others. =)
3 – I can’t believe I’ve never used this word in a blog post before. Even if it wasn’t a staple of Calvin and Hobbes, it’s still a fantabulicious word in it’s own right.  Plus, it’s a real word, unlike fantabulicious.

Solution:
sudo apt-get install os-prober
sudo update-grub

Fixed.  And while you’re down there, add some other useful stuff:

sudo wget –output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/$(lsb_release -cs).list && sudo apt-get –quiet update && sudo apt-get –yes –quiet –allow-unauthenticated install medibuntu-keyring && sudo
apt-get –quiet update

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras w32codecs libdvdcss2 flashplugin-installer gstreamer0.10-alsa

Those will come in handy sooner than later.