Posted inInformation Technology / Thank You Sir May I Have Another

Do Kids Know This Today?

seasoned_geek by seasoned_geek

I was sitting in my office checking email this Sunday morning when suddenly I couldn’t send email.  Oh I thought, my email service must be down.  No problem, I’ll check on my eBay auctions.  Nothing.  I enter the IP address of my HughesNet Gen4 device and run the little test it has, zero packet loss.  Click the customer care link, nothing.  Okay, now it’s time to call.  Oh wait, I have this thing auto billing a credit card.  There is no paper invoice with a customer service number on it. (*^(*&^(*&!$#%#

Hmmm, back in the day when we used to have long distance companies advertising you could hear a pin drop on their lines (despite the truly worthless local service lines your phone was connecting through no less) we used to have a toll free directory number.  I wonder if it still works?  Yep!

800-555-1212

Of course HughesNet couldn’t tell me what the outage was or when it would be fixed.  It took them a good 20 minutes of checking EVERYTHING else with my account before they checked to see if there was an outage.  This is the second complete outage I have had with HughesNet Gen4 in roughly a year.  Both times I have had to burn at least 20 minutes on the phone with a service rep running through EVERYTHING on a check list BEFORE they bothered to look at any system event announcements.  They don’t even have a spot on their couldn’t care less about the customer home page for “system event” announcements.

Still.  How many people under the age of 40 know there is a toll free directory service?  Admittedly it didn’t fix my Internet and it didn’t make HughesNet customer care work any better, but at least I knew it wasn’t anything on my end once I made the call.

Roland Hughes started his IT career in the early 1980s. He quickly became a consultant and president of Logikal Solutions, a software consulting firm specializing in OpenVMS application and C++/Qt touchscreen/embedded Linux development. Early in his career he became involved in what is now called cross platform development. Given the dearth of useful books on the subject he ventured into the world of professional author in 1995 writing the first of the "Zinc It!" book series for John Gordon Burke Publisher, Inc.

A decade later he released a massive (nearly 800 pages) tome "The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer" which tried to encapsulate the essential skills gained over what was nearly a 20 year career at that point. From there "The Minimum You Need to Know" book series was born.

Three years later he wrote his first novel "Infinite Exposure" which got much notice from people involved in the banking and financial security worlds. Some of the attacks predicted in that book have since come to pass. While it was not originally intended to be a trilogy, it became the first book of "The Earth That Was" trilogy:
Infinite Exposure
Lesedi - The Greatest Lie Ever Told
John Smith - Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars

When he is not consulting Roland Hughes posts about technology and sometimes politics on his blog. He also has regularly scheduled Sunday posts appearing on the Interesting Authors blog.