<font color=red>AN OPEN LETTER TO STEPHEN CASE
Dear Mr. Case,
You don't know me. I've never been interested in the services of AOL, and never will be.
I am, however, a subscriber to Roadrunner, and have been for over 4 years.
I am writing to you in public for two reasons; first, I can't get access to the help site for Roadrunner, and second, I want everyone else to see this letter.
While I have been pleased overall with Roadrunner over the years, there is one thing about the service that I find extremely annoying. It is the fact that Roadrunner is never ever wrong. In the entire time I have used the service, nobody at Roadrunner has EVER admitted to me on the phone that something was wrong. Not one time, ever. It has always been my computer, or the backbone, or something.
My most recent experience could be the "final straw".
Last week, I experienced slows with the service. I could not access some sites, and everything was loading very slow. I did the usual things to try and fix it. Eventually, after I had cleared my cache, done a scan and a defrag, rebooted and reset my modem, it was a bit better, so I let it go at that.
But that was not the end of my ordeal. You see, aside from being an ordinary customer, I also own a web site design business. One of the partners in my business also works for a very large publicly traded company. He is their webmaster. He runs dozens of sites. He has 11 T-1s in his little office. He is a very smart guy. He is a very, very good engineer, fluent in seven languages...and I do mean fluent. He's the best I have ever seen, and I have seen a few.
On my suggestion, about three months ago, he changed from DSL to Roadrunner at his home. His home is where the server is for a few sites that we own, as well as the backup server for his "regular job". It's a rather big piece of gear. It sits in his den, next to his stereo, close to the door to his pool.
On Sunday last, I had some trouble getting onto one of our development sites (hosted off the server at his home).I called him at work and he gave me a few tips, but nothing seemed to help.
It turned out there was something wrong with his server at home.
He called Roadrunner support to see if there were any problems he needed to know about. There were not, according to whomever he spoke to. He then spent about 9 hours trouble shooting, and finally narrowed it down to the network card in the server.
He called his hardware guy and drove a while to get a new network card, which he then installed.
The server still didn't work.
He then worked about an hour more and in desperation, he checked his Roadrunner connection.
Turns out the gateway had been changed by Roadrunner. (He keeps excellent records, and had an email from RR with all the applicable info, so there was no doubt that the gateway had been changed.)
There was nothing wrong with the server at all. He called Roadrunner and asked the service person about the change in his static address and the service person denied any knowledge of any changes. He then asked the service person for his gateway address, and the service person refused to give it to him. No, I am not making this up.
He simply hung up, called back, got a different service person, and innocently asked for his gateway address and got it. Sure enough, it had been changed.
Then another little glitch appeared. Due to things I don't understand, he had to rebuild his entire server. That took until yesterday afternoon. When he booted up to see if he had fixed everything, the server was *immediately* attacked by a worm. That real nasty one that attacks servers. He had made a little boo-boo, he had not installed his virus protection before he booted up the new server to see if it would work after he fixed the gateway problem.
Another five hours, and over 1,000 lost files later, he got the server back on line.
Some of the files that were lost contained some code for a site we are developing. Fortunately, I keep backup CDs of all our progress, so all we lost was about a week's work that I had not backed up. I don't know what else he lost that didn't have anything to do with me.
That's not all.
I decided to complain in writing about all this, but when I went to help.rr.com, I was prompted to enable cookies on my computer or I would not be allowed on your site.
Well, I don't do that.
So I can't access help.rr.com.
Even if I could, I'll bet five grand there is nothing on the site about RR jacking around with the gateways or whatever the eff else you people did to screw my life up for a week.
So I would like to ask you and all the people that work for you to do me a big favor:
In the future, if you decide to screw around with things that will cause your customers to be unable to get onto the Internet, would you please put out some kind of information on it BEFORE you do it? And while you are at it, you could maybe notify your tech people that sometimes you screw up and it might be all right to tell the friggin' truth about your screw-ups if a PAYING COMMERCIAL CUSTOMER WHO IS A TOP ENGINEER calls and asks if he really needs to tear his computer apart and replace hardware because "absolutely nothing is wrong at Roadrunner, sir".
Then, grab a dictionary and look up the word "service" and read it out loud to whoever you are paying to jack around without telling any customers for a week. Just keep calling him or her and reading the definition over and over for a week. That's how much time you cost me, so it's only fair.
And by the way, I will never buy your stock again.
As a matter of fact, since I happen to be a professional trader too, I am going to start shorting it. Just at the short-term tops. I'm good, I can do it. I figure you cost my business about ten grand, so that's how much I plan on taking back from the fools that own your stock. I'm telling all my friends, too. Right here on the Internet.
And if possible, it would be OK if I could get on your "help" (yeah, right) site without being FORCED to enable cookies on my machine, because it ain't gonna happen. Check and see how many sites force you to enable cookies, while you are at it. Check you competition, for example.
I see you make 383 grand a year for your vailant efforts to move the Internet into the 21st century. How about kicking someone's ass for me, since I can't get on your help site and nobody I talk to on the phone has any idea about any of this.
Have a wonderful day. |
