Monthly Archive for July, 2006

Well, tomorrow I turn 25. I don’t really know how to fell about it at all. A quarter of a century old. 2.5 decades old. I am still living at home. There is so much more that I wanted to have accomplished by this point. I wanted to not be living at home. I wanted to be earning more money. I wanted to have more friends than I do now (technically 3). What happened?

All I can assume that happened is I was stuck being a spoiled kid. I didn’t get a job until I was 18. I worked at the City of Santa Rosa for 3 months. Then, I worked at the Roxy for 3 years. If unfortunate events had not transpired, I would probably still be working there. I worked in retail for 2 years (all wasted) at Toys ‘R’ Us and Home Depot. Now I am working at Sonic.net in tier 1 tech support. I wish I was doing something more with my career. At least not in tier 1 anymore.

Don’t get me wrong, I love working at Sonic.net. I love doing tickets and learning all about networking and how all of our systems work together and provide the services that they do to our customers. I am just really tired of talking to the angry, crabby, upset customers that cannot appreciate what we DO offer them. You don’t have to wait on hold 90% of the time, the other 10% the hold time averages 2 minutes. I called SBC to cancel my DSL with them and had to wait well over 2 hours to get someone. But because a particular customer has bad internal wiring or a bad router or AT&T has messed up on the same customer and dropped the ball we are the bad guy.

I am tired of it. We are WAY better than 95% of the other companies out there. Now we are in the business of shooting ourself in the foot with the DSL promotions. Sure we pay less for the initial one year, and we pass that along, but then at the end of the term, people can’t see why they should pay anymore and jump ship to another ISP. At that point we have lost money all year on that customer, and have nothing to show for it. Some customers stay and pay the higher, out of term rate, but most don’t. I like to think that people will look at internet access not as a commodity, but as a service. Unfortunately, with the DSL pricing wars, it has become a commodity.

Back to my birthday…

Laura and Kohl have been planning this huge birthday surprise for me and taunting me with it for a while now. Well, the beans were spilled today and we are going to Marine World tomorrow. I am not sure if I want to push the mater and go to Great America instead. We will see. I also want to go to dinner somewhere nice, but I am not sure that was part of the plan or not. Time will tell.

On Tuesday, we are going to the fair, which should be nice this year (if the heat doesn’t kill us). Here’s hoping for a good couple of days ahead.