the continuing saga of my problems with bell:

When I transferred my phone line out of my aparement in L and into PI's apartment in T in april I used the online form to do the transfer. Aparently they didn't get the request so we had to wait another week while they sorted it out and transferred the number. When i emailed my room mate to tell her that the line had been transferred and not to worry she said the line was still working. After a bit of humming and hawing I called bell to ask if we could just have our old number back. Aparenly an answer (whether yes or no) costs $30. I gave up and my room mate called. She told them she wasn't going to pay them $30 'cause she was still able to make and receive calls on the old number and knew it was still free. They told her that was impossible and, after some arguing, she gave up and had a free phone connection for 4 months.

As well as this, the day the phone at PI's was supposed to be working we plugged it and got no dial tone. We called Bell and asked them what was wrong. They said they couldn't hook up a new phone line until their technicians came off strike. We said we'd had a phone line in the exact same apartment less than a year ago and they didn't need to put in a new line. They said there wasn't one existing at that address and we told them there were at least 4 existing at this address, 2 of which were not in use, make one work! They said they'd send someone over in less than 10 days if we could be home during the day to meet them. About 4 days later the phone just started working on its own.

When I called in Aug to have the internet reactivated in L (I had put it on hold) they said fine. As far as I know we had internet for about a week before the phone line finally died (as it was supposed to 4 months before). This left us w/o internet or a phone. I called bell and asked them to hook us back up with a new number since I wasn't about to pay them $30 to get the old number back. They said that would be fine and they could do it w/i 3 business days, which they did. They asked if I would like to order sympatico as well and I said yes. When they transferred me to sympatico the person there told me I couldn't activate internet on a phone number that didn't exist call back when I had a working phone. What was the point of that?!

I called back when the phone started working and they siad they would hook my internet up to my new phone number in 4-5 days (this being day 3 after the phone was dealt with). they called me back on day 3 of the 4-5 to tell me that they were still experiencing delays because of the strike they had this summer and couldn't hook me up before the 27th of sept (that was the 19th). in the mean time would I like a free unlimited dial up? sure I would. Better than nothing.

Yesterday I noticed that the dsl light was on on my modem but i wasn't getting an internet connection. I was too tired to deal with it. Today when I was working on my computer my mail notifier told me I had mail. I thought that was off considering I didn't have an internet connection. I opened my mail and aparently I DO have a connection! Except that it dies every 5 mins or so. I called Bell and they said that no, they had not set up my connection yet, no they could not do it any sooner than the 27th, and no, it was not possible that I had a connection anyway.

The long and the short of it is, I appologize to anyone trying to talk to me online since I drop off line every 5-10 mins for a bit.