Monday the Qwest lineman did come out. He said that our connectivity level is very low; he also said that a few years back Qwest modified the lines in our area. Apparently the connections are sealed some way to protect them from rain and snow. I guess that Qwest got tired of sending people out to check the lines when they got wet. The bad thing about this is that it is very difficult and sometimes impossible to make changes in the connections.

In our case, apparently the line carrying our DSL goes in and out of several branches. He wanted to give us a more direct line which was supposed to increase our connectivity. If he was not successful, he would have to turn it over to the DSL people; he just does line maintenance. By the time he left he said that he had doubled our level of connectivity but that was still half of what we were supposed to have and that he would turn it over to DSL.

Intermittently, we do have better connectivity but generally, it is the same low previous level. :-( To this point, it appears that no one from DSL has looked into it; certainly, no one has contacted us.

Someone finally replied to a message that we left with EarthLink. A very nice, hopefully helpful woman said that she had been out of her office for a few days. She acknowledged that there have been problems between EarthLink and Qwest and that she would try to check with Qwest about improving our service. We actually have no evidence that anything has happened or improved.

The new modem arrived yesterday. It is still in its box and we are wondering whether or not to open it until the issues between EarthLink and Qwest have been resolved.

Meanwhile, it is Thursday and that means it is time to work on the laundry. I wonder what is going to be sucked into a wormhole today.