Blessed by the Potato

Part of the reason my IP has been changing is that there’s a bit of a shake-up happening at Rogers. For a long time now I’ve been on the “grandfathered Extreme” plan — the $44, 5 Mbps plan that was introduced about 2 years ago by Rogers. Since that time, they’ve upgraded the Extreme plan to a $46, 6 Mbps for new customers, but many of us old ones were still getting the cheaper, marginally slower one. As I said earlier, Rogers is trying to get rid of its power users by increasing the price of the Extreme plan and getting rid of anyone who was “grandfathered”. So, I said that the new price was not worth it (especially as the standard Express plan had been upgraded to 5 Mbps), and asked to be downgraded (via the website referenced in the letter I got notifying me of the price increase). The transaction went through, I got a reference number, and was told that my downgrade should take effect in about 48 hours. A few days later I noticed that I was upgraded to the new version of Extreme, the 6 Mbps download (and an aside: this summer has been fantastic for my connection, all the students in my neighbourhood going away for the summer has made it the first time I’ve actually gotten the full listed speed from my modem, so I could actually detect this kind of change). Since I didn’t want to be paying more for it (not even $2/month more while they processed my downgrade request), I called in and asked about it. I got transferred between 3 people (2 of whom didn’t even know I was on the 5 Mbps Extreme plan, not knowing it existed), and found out that my request on the webpage never registered, despite the tracking number. So, I asked the final person to downgrade me, and much to my surprise, she offered to leave me on Extreme and not apply the upcoming price increase for a year! It completely boggled me, as I’ve always had to fight with Rogers to do anything, yet here they were offering me a deal for no reason (I didn’t even have to ask — I was going to continue paying them the same amount for slightly less service anyway).

Amazing luck, as usually getting Rogers to do much of anything is a minor miracle, so I’ve been pretty high about it. When I hung up the phone I was in shock, not believing it had happened. It was a bit of a pain when earlier today I got an email that the automated system had finally registered my downgrade request (with a different tracking number too), a week and a half later. As I feared, that had wiped out my “negotiated” discount. I called Rogers and spent 45 minutes on the phone bounced between 3 agents, but they finally gave me nearly the same deal (it’ll be $2 more per month since I’m starting from the new Extreme now, there being no $45, 5 Mbps plan to put me on anymore). I didn’t even have to beg or threaten to go down there, I just simply had to wait while each sucessive agent checked on something (presumably with a supervisor) and bumped me up the ladder. If I was amazed and shocked the first time I got the deal, I felt like bloody Heracules for keeping it after the second set of calls.

There are some caveats, of course: this now locks me into a 12-month contract with Extreme, but with the phone lines in my place I wasn’t really planning on going anywhere. They didn’t mention anything about not telling people, but I should warn you that Rogers is really weird and random about cutting deals: calling and telling them that your friend got a deal, or that practically everyone else in Ontario got a DOCSIS compatable modem, or that Bell’s willing to offer you a lower price, will virtually guarantee that you won’t get a deal. I also have no idea how they determine who is and is not a “good” customer and thus eligible for a discount or more timely repairs. I’ve had reasonably good luck here in London (it took a few tries when the node was overloaded, but things are quite a bit better now, though I’ll have to wait until September to be sure), but they won’t do anything for me on my parents’ account in Toronto. I’d consider both accounts to be good customers: I’ve been with them for over 3 years, have the most expensive internet plan, and own my modem (so they got the money before the rental charges came back, and it makes me less likely to leave — though that cuts both ways: why entice someone who has more corporate inertia?). My parents have had Rogers TV since before we moved there in 1987, upgraded early on to multiple digital terminal outlets with all kinds of channel packages, and we’ve had cable internet since around 1998 (just after it moved from the Wave to @Home). Plus my brother’s cell phone plan is with Rogers at the same address (and he upgrades his handset every year or so, paying a hefty premium for it, too). Yet despite having less than 1/10th the advertised speed for over 4 years (I only really noticed just how bad it was when I moved out here and saw how much faster things were in London — and this was an overloaded node at the time!), I’ve never been able to get them to admit to any problem with the modem or neighbourhood (although posts from dslreports.com indicate that that area of Willowdale has terrible congestion, with everyone getting low speeds like that). I call and complain every month or so in the hopes that a long enough call history will finally point the way to a problem, but often they just tell me to call back again later in case the problem is temporary. I have to ask Netbug if the call history comes up for them or not. Last time after having the tech try to sell me on a new $100 modem (without admitting anything was wrong with the current one for a replacement), and then telling me to reformat my computer (after telling him it was brand new out of the box and that the old one didn’t go any better) I finally gave up and asked to be downgraded to the Light plan so I would at least pay less for the crappy speeds… and the tech said he couldn’t do that and hung up on me! I don’t know if there are different call centres in London and Toronto, or if my parents somehow have some sort of tech support red flag, but you can see why this call history would lead me to enter a nearly comatose state of disbelief when they offered to save me money out of the blue…

Well, I’m up at the cottage for the long weekend, along with Millie, my parents dog (they’re off to PEI). To keep the dog smell out of my car, I took my mom’s truck, and wow is it ever a different experience to drive that thing. To say the engine roared to life when we first pulled on the highway and got up to speed is completely wrong: it didn’t even purr. The engine yawned, as though saying “yeah, no problem; wake me when you need me.”

Loading the trunk was no problem, but closing it was a little rough as the door was pretty high up when fully opened. Not a problem, as there was a bright red button to press that made the trunk close all on its own. The headlights had harnessed the power of twin suns (I was worried the whole way up that the fusion containment might fail), and illuminated the tops of trees a long distance down the road. It seemed everything in it was tweaked and powered to a ridiculous degree: the 3-zone A/C, the stereo faceplate that flipped up to insert a CD, the no fewer than 8 buttons on the steering wheel (2 of which I still can’t figure out — Wayfare won’t let me press them in case they’re for the ejection seats or to deploy the heat seeking missiles, and with this truck, we can’t be sure they aren’t on there); even the windshield wipers have a funny little shimmy to them to get rid of that little triangle of unwiped area at the centre-bottom of the windshield. I find it difficult to imagine wanting a car where the engineers seemed to sit around and dare each other to find new and creative ways to make something needlessly powered, automated, hidden, button-activated, remote-activated, or covered in leather. That said, it was nice being up high — though I wouldn’t need to be if everyone else wasn’t driving an SUV.

The weather is gorgeous up here after the giant storm cleared the air of the heat and humidity that haunted the region last week (thankfully, I couldn’t make it then :). It also knocked down a tree and a half into our yard, and a rather large tree at that, but it isn’t on the cottage, deck, or driveway, so I’m not too concerned (certainly not concerned enough to actually try using the chainsaw… I’ve seen Evil Dead).

Millie is a bulldog (I’ll try to get a picture after I get access to a camera). She looks kinda sad and kinda tough, but is in actuality the suckiest dog ever. She mopes and whines if I leave the room, and won’t go to sleep unless I come tuck her in. For the first day here she wouldn’t even go eat unless I came with her to the laundry room (where her food is), and she won’t go pee unless I come at least halfway down the lawn with her. She’s one step away from needing a glass of water and a peek in the closet for monsters…

There have been a lot of long weekend fireworks set off out here, and it isn’t even the free day yet (Sunday/Monday). I know that it’s a pretty big tradition across Canada to have Victoria Day and Canada Day fireworks, but apparently no one else has heard of Simcoe Day (August Long Weekend) fireworks except the people who happen to live on the lake here.

My IP has been changing a fair bit with Rogers, so the site has been becoming inaccessable at times. I decided a while ago to just go ahead and get some real hosting, since I don’t think I’m going to stop updating in the next year or so (and hope you will continue to read…), but I just haven’t gotten around to actually doing anything about it yet. I will soon, and hopefully at that point everything will settle down and there won’t be any more outages.

Right now, I’m using dial-up to get on, and SWEET HOLY POTATO IN THE BLACK EARTH BELOW is it ever slow! I thought I remembered dial-up, I used to use it all the time. Back then it was a 28.8, too, and now I’m connected at 46.6, and I can barely use it to check my email. I was expecting images and the like to take a while to load, perhaps some extra lag for text pages, but this is ridiculous. I’m looking at almost a minute just to get to a site, after it times out two or three times. Have I been spoiled by cable? Is dial-up always this bad, or are the phone connections particularly troublesome after all that storm activity this week? I doubt it’s due to conjestion, since it’s the wee hours of the morning in cottage country…

I heard on the news that gas prices were going up significantly in advance of the long weekend, to the $1.15/L range. I already filled up earlier in the week at $1.05 expecting some such foolishness, but was quite surprised this evening when I drove by a gas station at $1.12, then the next one at $0.977 (with a fairly busy lot), then further down the road, 2 stations across the street from each other at $0.944 — the cars waiting in line backed out onto the road and nearly stopping traffic at that intersection. I just don’t understand some of this gas price behaviour — if the price really is going up, then how can the stations afford to drop it like that? If they have that kind of leeway in their margins, then are they screwing us the rest of the time? It reminds me of some of the other patterns in gas pricing. When I first moved to London, there was a very reliable pattern where the gas prices would go up on the weekend, and for most of the week would be higher in Toronto than in London. However, Monday nights they would reliably drop in London, dipping a bit below what Toronto was charging on the weekend. About two years ago the situation got a fair bit more complex, and I haven’t seen as much of a “weekend effect” in London, though there does still seem to be one in Toronto. Then there are particular stations: the one at Don Mills and Finch tends to lower its prices by 3-5 cents/L on Friday and Saturday nights after midnight (and it’s strange to see the streets virtually empty, but cars waiting 4 deep out onto the road for cheap gas). This latest nonsense with prices about 10 cents/L lower than par, I just don’t get… sometimes I think the station owners just get a kick out of motorists going crazy in line.

Also, this afternoon I was talking about the dipping sauces pretty much every pizza place sells nowadays, and pointed out that it can’t be too long before they start selling them in the grocery stores. In fact, many places (such as Easttown and Pizza Hut) just use prepackaged Hellman’s sauces, so I was surprised that they weren’t already available for individuals. And sure enough, tonight at Sobeys I saw featured in their deli section a 3-pack of Pizza Pizza dipping sauce; very serendipitous. What I found odd was that they were actually charging more for them than Pizza Pizza was ($3.85 for 3; I know the prices have gone up recently, but I do believe they’re still less than a dollar at Pizza Pizza).