Still no DSL and other moving updates.

[rivka]

Still drowning in a thousand little problems and inconveniences associated with the move. I think that eventually this will be a wonderful house to live in, and we'll be very happy there. Right now? Things are pretty frustrating.

More entries for the Big Bulleted List Of Frustration:

• When they put the washer back in after the basement remodel, they didn't turn on the water connection. Which we discovered only when trying to run a load of laundry.


• Ditto for the dishwasher. Fortunately I didn't start a load of dishes and then go to bed, as I'd considered doing. Instead we caught the problem after about five minutes of asking each other, "Do you think the dishwasher is supposed to sound like that?"


• The dryer had a broken screen inside, which I didn't discover until - yes, a theme is beginning to develop here - I tried to dry a load of clothes. Michael had to find an appropriately-sized screw and screw it back into place.


• Also, the automatic drying cycle on the dryer doesn't work - it shuts off partway through. You have to use the timed drying cycle instead. I learned this when I went to get the laundry out and discovered that it was still soaking wet. At 11pm. With another load of wet clothes that needed to go in the dryer.


• The outlet that didn't work turned out to be controlled by the light switch for the basement stairs. So our computers will only work when the basement light is on.


• Somewhere in our search for a switch that controlled the outlet, we must have accidentally shut off the outside light that works by motion detector. We can't figure out how to turn it back on.


• We still don't have DSL at home. Supposed cause: "a fault in the line." The Verizon guy told me, in tones of one conferring a great favor, that they have given us free dial-up in the interim. Me: "I don't think we even have the equipment to use dial-up." Verizon guy, condescendingly: "Of course you do! Would you like me to transfer you to tech support so they can explain how to use it?" Memo to Verizon: it's 2008. We have been your DSL customers for five years. Why would you expect us to have dial-up modems?


• The cable guy sat in his truck outside the house and called Michael's cell phone. When Michael didn't answer, he decided that we weren't interested in cable service and drove off without ever knocking on the door. Even though all the lights were on and thus, one would assume, it was obvious that no one was home.


• The cable company kept us on the phone for two and a half hours last night as we tried to resolve the situation. They never came back. They refused to schedule us for a return appointment earlier than Monday. When Michael said this was unacceptable and asked to speak to a supervisor, the supervisor transferred him to "dispatch," promising to see if a truck could be sent out the same day. No one ever answered. We gave up after more than an hour.


• The only outlet near our entertainment center thingy turned out to be non-grounded. We wound up having to run an extension cord across the room.


• Alex's room and especially her bathroom are oddly cold.


• I think there's actually more, but I am too disheartened to go on listing things.

All of these things are surmountable. In fact, many of them have already been surmounted. It's just that cumulatively they are discouraging and exhausting. On top of all of the work trying to get settled into the new house, we're trying to clean the old house and move the last five percent of our stuff. At least the new house is close enough to the old house that the baby monitor works across both places, so we can go over late at night to clean. Except for the part where, late at night, we would really rather be in bed.

Alex initially took the move very well - she was excited and happy to come home to the new house and discover all our things there. In recent days, it has finally sunk in that we won't ever be going back to live in our old house again, and she's having some trouble with that. She doesn't really understand why. I think, in her mind, the move was just like when we go to visit someone else's house and bring some of our own things - except on a larger scale. So it's like going on vacation and then never coming back home. We totally forgot to include the permanency factor when we were explaining things to her in advance.

Also, she is not happy that (until late last night) we didn't have the TV/VCR/DVD/TiVO equipment hooked up yet. She's never been allowed to watch much TV (one video a day unless she's sick, and often no TV at all on school days), but apparently not having the option to watch anything is the everything-is-different straw that broke the camel's back.

Her stress is manifesting as (a) excessive sleepiness, and (b) whining and tantrums. Which might be related to the excessive sleepiness. She melts down all evening until we can get her into bed, and then she sleeps so late in the morning that I have to wake her for nursery school, to which we are thus inevitably late. This is not a particularly fun parenting cycle. It took us until late last night to realize that, duh, this is probably moving stress and not just Alex suddenly becoming an awful person. Hopefully that realization will make us more tolerant... except that, you know, we're pretty stressed out too.

Someday soon we will have gotten enough of the extra moving work done that I will be able to take a long hot bath in my new clawfoot bathtub. And then everything will be okay. Right?

Comments

[chargirlgenius.livejournal.com]

Verizon drives me batty. We signed up for DSL when we moved to our current place, cable being unavailable. Because it was a new house, they had to do things to the line, etc. etc. When things didn’t work out, they sent me an email telling me I couldn’t get DSL. An email. Needless to say I was a tad irritated, with a six-week old baby and no internet.

http://chargirlgenius.livejournal.com/24902.html

[telerib.livejournal.com]

They did the same thing to us, too, and were so very puzzled when my husband expressed frustration.

We have Comcast now.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

They didn't even send us an e-mail to tell us that our DSL service start would be delayed. They just let Michael spend ages trying to get it set up, and then more ages on hold with tech support.

Also? Their supposedly "smart" computer call-fielding system is incredibly annoying, and harder to get rid of than most. On Saturday night I battled that thing for a full 20 minutes before it finally admitted that no actual humans were on duty. If I'd known that at the outset, I would've hung up right away and saved myself a lot of frustration.

Not that I'm bitter.

[kcobweb.livejournal.com]

Actually, we had a similar situation with Verizon in our last rental house.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

When I decided to spring for DSL last year with Verizon, I couldn't connect. I got to where I knew the passwords for all their test sites and could explain exactly what was happening, but they kept saying they'd called me and I didn't answer. Well, I don't have a phone plugged in to their line, I use my cell phone, and I made a big deal to call that. So it took 26 days, I think, to actually get DSL here, because they were stupid. Some guy reset something at the head office and voila! DSL! I was supposed to get a free month first, and I tried getting that moved to the second month, since I didn't have service the first month, but no, that was my free month.

If I was willing to go with Comcast for everything, I'd switch.

Alex's excessive sleepiness

[(Anonymous)]

Which probably isn't helped by the change to Daylight Savings Time (poor kid, and you...)

Re: Alex's excessive sleepiness

[rivka.livejournal.com]

I'm sure DST isn't helping the mornings any, yeah - although oddly enough, she hasn't had any trouble falling asleep early. Her normal bedtime is 7:30 with no nap. On Sunday, DST change day, she asked to take a nap (rare occurrence!) and slept from 3 to 6pm. I figured she'd be up half the night after that, but she was fast asleep by 9pm - only a half-hour later than normal, by her body clock.

The other thing that DST is causing is one more weirdness in her life: it's not dark when we have dinner. That seems like it should be no big deal, but when you can't tell time, apparently it really messes you up to no longer be able to associate "getting dark" with "dinnertime."

You know, I honestly expected her to go the other route, and have a lot of night wakings and trouble falling asleep in the new house. Nope.

[kcobweb.livejournal.com]

Elena didn't sleep well for the first week in this house. Then she settled down. With DST thrown in the mix, it's probably that much harder on poor Alex.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Moving is always oddly irritating -- and I mean that literally, it's always irritating in odd ways, like with your basement light switch, that nobody could have imagined.

My dryer only does timed as well. It's not so bad when you get used to it. (As I own my dryer, I suppose I could get it fixed, but... actually it's fine like that compared to the hassle.)

With DSL, little black and gold nanotech DSL beetles have to crawl all the way through the line from wherever the DSL company's home is, building a DSL line all the way. That's why it always takes so long. Also, when it randomly stops working it's because some of the beetles have wandered off. The people in DSL companies don't want to tell you this in case you'd be frightened, which is why their explanations never make any sense. They're out there now rounding up the beetles, which have little corporate logos on their shiny backs, so they can tell your Verizon beetles from Z's Vif beetles, and soon your line will work. This may not be strictly true, but it's as reliable and trustworthy as anything they tell you, and much more soothing to contemplate.

As for Alex, I think when you are sorted out, after the bath, you should have a "This is home now" housewarming party, with cake and maybe a visitor -- if you have a visitor who could bring cake, this would be ideal. Light a candle. Sing a song. ("There's no place like home" or "Show me the way to go home" or "Home sweet home".) That will be a marker that this is where you live now. If this doesn't work, though it probably would, I suggest going away somewhere overnight and then coming back. That always works.

[ratphooey.livejournal.com]

Yes.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

The outlet that didn't work turned out to be controlled by the light switch for the basement stairs. So our computers will only work when the basement light is on.

Please report this to your landlord ASAP and ask them to resolve the situation. This is a major alarm sign for unsafe wiring, and you do not want to find out the hard way _what else_ has been wired by an amateur in their spare time.

I'm sorry that your move meets so many snags, and I feel sorry for Alex, but this is one of the things that you cannot control at all. Maybe it helps if you explain again _why_ you had to move - you're not just doing it on a whim, or because the new house is nicer; but you move because you had to, and you're sad to leave the old house, too, but these are the good points of the new house, and everything else - all her friends, her nursery etc - are still in the same place.

Have you had a ceremony to say goodbye to the old place? For me, as grownup, it's always that last cleaning where I go into every single last corner; but something simpler might help her.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

We've avoided taking her back into the old house because, not to put too fine a point on it, it's a wreck. There are odds and ends of our possessions scattered on the floor and big drifts of dust bunnies from where the furniture used to be. It looks kind of creepy to me, and I'm a grownup who's expecting it.

But taking her on a last tour to say goodbye once it's cleaned out is a good idea.

We've tried to explain why we moved, and she doesn't really get it. She doesn't understand the concept of "rented," which is reasonable enough given that she's not even three yet and doesn't yet grasp the idea that money is exchanged for goods and services. To her, the old house was ours because we lived there, and our explanations that the house really belongs to "Mr. Stefan" (what she calls our former landlord) are nonsensical.

As you say, this is one of the things that we can't control. I think that in the end all we can do is affirm her sadness, try to get her life back to normal as soon as possible, and wait.

[wcg.livejournal.com]

Oh how frustrating.

FWIW, I ordered Verizon FiOS back in early February. There was a guy at my house the next morning to survey the path for the buried cable, and the cable was actually installed within a week to a box on the outside wall of my house. But for reasons known only to the mavens at Verizon, they're not going to install the box *in* my house until the 13th of this month. I hope your DSL is completed more quickly.

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

The outlet that didn't work turned out to be controlled by the light switch for the basement stairs. So our computers will only work when the basement light is on.

That's pretty nutty. I have no clue as to the reasoning there, from an electrical point of view.

The cable guy sat in his truck outside the house and called Michael's cell phone. When Michael didn't answer, he decided that we weren't interested in cable service and drove off without ever knocking on the door. Even though all the lights were on and thus, one would assume, it was obvious that no one was home.

And that's just appalling, as is the non-resolution. I hope they get their heads out of their arses, and soon.

In answer to your last question, yes -- everything will be okay. This is just the shakedown that happens after every life upheaval. It's like the old shampoo ads -- "it won't happen overnight, but it will happen!" Hang in there, eh?

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

The outlet being wired to the basement stairs switch is almost certainly amateur wiring. You'd be surprised at the stupid things people do. I'd want to look at the wiring -- it might not be fire safe. Rivka, if you guys do buy this house, make sure it gets a good inspection first.

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

We decided to replace quite a lot of light fittings at once at one point, and the electrician we recruited discovered some of the existing wiring was unsafe. In the end, he rewired the entire house.
The exhaust fan in the bathroom was connected using speaker wire.
The supposedly earthed points had been done in a cheap shoddy way and weren't legally earthed.
When working on the dining room lights, the electrician got shocked, because the lights in the dining room were not on the lights circuit.
That was stressful enough, and we didn't have moving to contend with.