Category: Consumer Complaints

OK, here comes a shitpost… Years ago, when my daughter’s boys (in their teens now) were toddlers and a bit thereafter, daughter’s family bought a house in Richfield, with the Southdale Public Library basically in their back yard. (We also lived in Richfield, so this was handy for baby-sitting.)

They went about remodeling the kitchen – themselves.

Then my idiot former son-in-law realized that cutting and installing the counter-tops was probably beyond his skills and tools. So he hired someone for that step of the process… ON CRAIGSLIST.

Goes out to the garage while the guy’s working, to find him cutting the big corner mitre cut using a jigsaw… a saw specifically designed to allow you to cut a non-straight line… a saw that sucks pucky balls at one specific thing: cutting a straight line. Fired him on the spot. But wound up with a horrible kitchen counter anyway.

I like to think that guy eventually did get better tools and better skills, but nevertheless never really grasped the goal, the vision, the reason we do things the way we do them.

What made this story pop into my head? Well I’ll show you.

Therapist: What's been bugging you lately? Me: Saw this at a house I showed the other day. Below that, a corner kitchen sink, wherein the cabinets have two 45-degree jogs, but the countertop has a 55-degree jog and a 35-degree jog, and the sink is aligned parallel to, but not centered upon, the short middle askew section.

I opened a ticket with their help system 6/15/23 8:02 AM with the following:

Xfinity internet had been dropping 2-4x/day briefly the past couple weeks. Then yesterday morning, it was out first thing, and this time the outage really was on their outage map. Outage ended on time, and everything came back online except my Cisco SPA525G with three lines (voip.ms, hamsoverip, hamshackhotline).

I have had to MANUALLY edit some things in the web UI for each of voip.ms and hamsoverip, and they both came back to working.

I need to MANUALLY edit whatever’s wrong with hamshackhotline, but because you guys do this auto-magical provisioning script thing, I’m unable to find plain instructions/screenshots of what fields need to say what. I don’t even know what my SIP account’s password is. If I’d ever been told, it’d be in my 1Password – it is not. Was only ever known by someone on your crew who did stuff remotely.

Where can I get the details necessary to MANUALLY re-configure SPA525G for HsH 11079?

This was their response…

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Bill Lewis posted 6/15/23 8:32 AM 

Hello Kelvin D. Olson,

As requested, here is your password: a3869(obfuscatedBitsForReasons)5903b728

Please be advised that because you will now be modifying settings in your endpoint, you are now transitioning from “Full Service Support” to “Self Service Support”. This basically means that it might be possible for you to accidentally change a setting in your phone and disrupt your service with us.

Because we won’t know what you changed, there will be no way for us to effectively help you.

If you find your phone in a condition where it does not operate as it should anymore, you will be required to perform a full factory reset on your phone, and then perform a re-provision to restore your phone to the settings we recommend for optimal performance.

Regards,

 Closed by Bill Lewis with status of Closed 6/15/23 8:32 AM

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Kelvin D. Olson posted 6/15/23 8:44 AM 

Well… aren’t you just awful?

Please close my account.

So… these guys work from the assumption that if you’re getting a VOIP phone, you’re getting it to do one and only one thing. They have you point your VOIP phone at an automated provisioning script which wipes out anything ELSE you’ve got going on that phone. When you instead sign up with HamsOverIP.com, you get access to a Wiki wherein the left menu contains…
Configuration Guides
..Endpoints
….Hard Phones
……Cisco
……..Cisco 525g
…and there you find step-by-step instructions, and screenshots of all the settings on the web UI for the phone.

NIGHT AND DAY DIFFERENT from giving me the password (one of MANY things I needed to know), closing the issue, telling me there’s “no way for us to effectively help you.” Uhm, fuck you, I can show you a great example of a way to effectively help me. You’re just an Alpha Hotel and a LID, Bill.