We’re back!
Sorry about the downtime. In the end, I have to admit that it all boils down to one simple thing — money matters aren’t my strong point.
I was facing a bit of a money crunch last month, so made the choice to let my phone bill slide a bit in order to pay rent. So, rent got paid, but the phone bill wasn’t right away. Normally, this isn’t a problem — when your bill goes late, Qwest does a ‘soft disconnect’ where you can receive calls but not place calls, which as a side affect allows a DSL connection to stay active. It’s only after being in the ‘soft disconnect’ state for a week or so that they’ll come out and do a physical disconnect of the wires, which takes all phone service (and DSL service) down.
I actually did get back to Qwest to pay the phone bill in an effort to keep things from going down — unfortunately, I got them paid the same day that the physical disconnect order went in, and everything was cut. Then, since it was a complete physical disconnect, I had to place an entirely new phone order, and wait for Qwest to get around to coming out and reconnecting the lines, which happened at some point before 10am Seattle time today.
On the upside, though, I was able to keep the same phone number, and the DSL connection came back up along with the phone line (which Speakeasy had actually indicated would not happen), so everything is all up, running, and hunky-dory again. Woohoo!
Now I get to try to catch up with the last week’s worth of happenings that I’ve missed. Ooh, that’ll be fun!