Is It All About The Money? or Techies vs ISP Guys

I love the ISP guys we have for our home internet service--usfamily.net. At work, well that's a different story. I won't name them save to say they are NOT usfamily.

Yesterday I wrote about dealing with our ISP guys on five occasions on behalf of the guys at work. We did not have much success fixing our e-mail problem, so Techies came to the rescue.

Okay, Techies was going to charge $328 to work on two "stations" or computers to fix this e-mail problem. But when they came, it seemed the problem had cleared up. The e-mail had stopped scrolling. He looked things over on both computers, gave me some suggestions on how to get better performance (adding more RAM) and charged us less than half the intended fee.

Well, Jon came back to his computer and it seemed things were going well. But then he discovered that he had lost his address book on his computer. This address book had over SEVEN HUNDRED names on it and they were in neat categories.

So, I called the ISP guys again (they don't charge for tech questions since they bill us for our regular service). The one guy said, "Well, I told you (yesterday) if you delete Netscape (which we did per their suggestion) and don't back everything up, you might lose it." This was not the news I wanted to hear and I don't recall hearing ANYTHING about backing up address books. Am I dumb?

Soooo I called Techies again, thinking maybe this could be part of the billing of earlier in the day since we didn't give their guy enough of a workout. Thankfully, he asked for Jon (I really have no business being the middle man/woman anyway) and I went back to my desk.

I could see by the red light on the phone that Jon and Techie man were engaged in something for quite some time. When I heard Jon say "Yes!" I was very excited. He came downstairs and told me that the Techie guy took over his computer in a remote sort of way. I had a techie do this to my computer at an earlier time, too, and it is amazing to watch, but sort of scary in a Big Brother Is Watching You kind of way. You sit at your computer and watch your mouse fly across the screen doing various clicking and opening different windows. You are not the one doing the mousing--the techie is doing it all from his remote location. Weird yet wonderful.

Jon said the techie did about 80 different things, but in the end he found Jon's e-mail address book and saved it in an excel file "just in case."

I'm wondering what the charge will be for this call, but I think it will be worth it. Jon and I have spent the good part of two days trying to deal with computer problems. Now he's back on line and we are singing Techies praises.

As for the ISP guys--well, we might be looking for a new server soon. Any recommendations?

Till next time,


Suzi