I Am Furious - Yellow (Doggerelist)

 

The AT&T service tech today was excellent. He arrived, explored the problem despite all obstacles, eventually managed to locate the problem as a lack of DHCP service on my local network (something that usually comes from the router on this system) and a failure to login on the AT&T network (newer modems do this; mine is too old, but the router will do it if properly set up), created a new DSL connection under Linux (not even part of his skill set until today), connected successfully to AT&T... and hit a brick wall attempting to enter a required profile for me on the SBC site. The "error"? SBC insists that your browser must be either IE 6.0+ or Safari (some version). It doesn't matter if your browser has identical functionality; SBC scans the modem ID string and is strict about your using one of those two browsers to set up its service.

SBC is in effect telling me that my Ubuntu Linux system, which worked for four months without incident of any sort, may not be used on their system in an ordinary manner. I guess I have cooties, or at least Linux does.

The very clever tech created a new standalone DSL connection on my computer which can be connected to AT&T via an explicit login to their network. Separately, we arranged a functionally identical connection from Stella's Windows Vista computer. She needs it worse than I do, so our default will be to connect hers and  leave mine lonely.

So I am blogging from Stella's machine. I have until she gets home (and takes me to the boot doctor) to finish all my web work.

I told the poor gentleman that I would give him rave reviews on the survey for his work, but that I did not consider the problem fixed. A week ago, I had a working net connection. Today, I have nothing... because of an AT&T policy against the arguably second most popular browser in the nation.

As noted... I am furious.