Abbaye St-Benoit-du-lac
I took about a gazillion photos on our trip to Quebec, promising to share them with our traveling companions once we got home. I was also looking forward to printing the best ones and making a little Three Pines Scrapbook before the ‘importance’ of those images fades into just another trip. I shudder to think of my son going through my photos (as I went through my folks’ pictures) wondering who those people were and what those places were all about. Better he should have the images gathered and explained in an album, though truth to tell, it will probably end up with the same eventual fate!
So, as soon as we got home, I began sending images to my laptop – or so I thought. They didn’t come through. Nyel sent me a few disparate images that he had taken. They came through but not for twenty-four hours and not enough of then to ‘tell the story’! After many, many tries with both cell phones and both of our laptops, we concluded that we do not have enough internet speed here in Oysterville for the transfer to work – even though we are reducing the size of each photo by the greatest possible percentage before sending.
Bill Grennan, Quebec City
We tested our download and upload speeds. 1.35 Mbps and 0.53 Mbps respectively. Seemed slower than what it should be for the ‘package’ we pay for, so we called our new internet provider – the company that has taken over for Reach One and found that, according to their records, we are getting what we pay for.
“Can we please upgrade?” we asked, even though I am sure we had done that years ago when it was still Reach One. The answer to our question amazed, astounded, and annoyed. “Only if you change providers.”
Our choice: CenturyLink. Period. More phone calls. In fact, the day was consumed with explanations from “customer support” personnel, “technical support” personnel, etc. etc. ad nauseum. More techie talk of which I understood only, “Currently you aren’t much better off than when you had dial-up.” We were on the phone for hours and I still don’t know what happened when Rainier Connect gobbled up Reach One.
Eventually and inevitably, we succumbed to the only option. As of Monday, the dreaded and all powerful CenturyLink will be our provider. Magically (and with a lot of money thrown in), we will quadruple our download and upload speeds and I can release the images trapped in my cell phone. Or so they say.
I can sympathize with you totally. Technology can be a real puzzle and the providers can tell us about anything that we hope will benefit us. If we have to call customer service we speak to someone over seas and many times I have a hard time understanding them. We have had problems with out land line phone for years off and on. Technicians come check things out and the last one told us there is something probably right in our neighborhood that is causing interference so that is why our phone will go in and out. We need to ditch our land line phone and just rely on our cell phone but hate to do that.