Mr. Chris and The Slow Internet Connection

Thursday the Internet connection here, which is AT&T U-Verse fiber optic 6 mbps Pro service was extremely slow. Scott was getting bumped from xbox live, web surfing was painfully slow, and downloads were close to unbearable!

I did a soft reboot of the Residential Gateway, a unit pictured below that centralizes IP TV, IP Phone, and Internet into one unit that also connects to your existing home phone wiring so no new phones are needed for IP Telephony, and this seemed to somewhat mitigate things. Wow! Am I the master of run-on sentences or what?

Yesterday I noticed it was slow again, but there were other things going on so nothing further was done. This AM, particularly since the kids were at their Mom's for her week, I had plenty of time to kill after a bad nights sleep that was filled with very strange dreams. As I mentioned I have 6 mbps service and multiple speed tests to different locations and through different companies were showing download speeds as slow as 1.2 mbps!

So, I got on a tech support chat with a woman named Geraldine at AT&T and I told her what was going on. I was very impressed with her, because instead of following the usual reading from a script of things to do, and ignoring any of my inputs, she actually listened to what I had to say! Also note that this was not going to b the only surprise AT&T had in store for me this day!

She asked permission to login to my Residential Gateway and I gave it, and soon I could hear her scurrying about intermixed with the other ones and zeros on my network. She worked her magic, and did a reboot, and then, second surprise, even though she was sure this would rectify the issue, she called me on the phone to follow up 10 minutes later when she saw activity on the Internet connection.

We soon discovered while my speed had improved it was still barely half of what it should be. She put me on hold and transferred me to a gentleman named Tim who listed to me as well, and did some testing and discovered noise on the line from the street leading to my house. He mentioned a technician would have to pay a visit. Sigh; what were my chances of having this before sometime next week I figured!

Here's where AT&T delivered the coup de grace and told me a technician could be on site in less than an hour if that was agreeable to me!

So, here I sit, exercise bike riding temporarily postponed until after AT&T comes and looks at my line. Note while I was spell checking this, Bob from AT&T called to inform me he would be here within 20 minutes or so!

Oh, as to the strange dreams I had? You did not really think I was going to let that slide did you? I went to bed around 1:30 AM. Last time I looked at the clock it was 3 AM before finally fell asleep even though I was dog tired.

I had dreams of trying to cook Taylor Ham on a grill in the bedroom closet so no one would know I was eating it, crawling through the infrastructure of a huge housing project looking for my kid who turned out to be a kid I had never seen before, fighting little 2 inch tall people (like the ones in the Night of the Museum movies) that were trying to take over the world, and eating at a restaurant with the X, her parents, and our kids where the mac cheese came in portable electric warmers made of gold and the snooty waiters and maitre d’ made us move the heavy tables around before they would seat us! After being seated I noticed little people coming in through a crack in the wall, evidently a carryover from the earlier dream!

Interesting because in these dreams I see my desire to still be in a normal family relationship, my longing for foods I can't have, and the elements from a recent movie I saw.