Transferred to India...Never to Return

Oh Boy. Well, last night Andrew and I worked ALL night on trying to get our new Vonage phone service to work. (My brother Paul transferred his service to us and sent us his router.) Unfortunately, we couldn't get the darned router to work. Our phone is messed--we cut the phone line last year when we were putting in our yard and ever since it just hasn't been the same. There's a loud buzzing on our end, but other people can usually hear us okay. Example: Two weeks ago, someone from the bishopric called (still no idea who it was--because of the bad connection) and was asking me to do something. I had no idea what he wanted. I was like (loud voice) "You want me to do WHAT?" I finally figured out he wanted me to pray in Sacrament meeting. He must have thought I wasn't too bright. So it's been a problem that we've been getting more and more sick of (plus paying more in taxes than for our actual service with Qwest). But since the big rain yesterday--it's gotten much much worse (the rain shorted the line even more).

So Andrew tried to talk to Vonage over the phone, but they just said they couldn't hear him and would transfer him to someone else--who--big surprise--couldn't hear him. It was so frustrating. (And yes, we should have called Qwest and had them fix the line a long time ago...). So we got my brother on Gmail chat and luckily he was willing to call Vonage for us and relay everything they were saying through the chat (Poor Paul. Thank you!) It was a long process and the non-English speaking Indians (don't worry I'm not racist--I just sound like one) had no clue what was going on. They just kept telling us to unplug it, plug it back in. Is there dial tone? No. Hmm, okay, well--try unplugging it. Then maybe if you plug it back in--okay. Now check. Dial tone? NO! I'm not kidding--this went on for hours. They just found different ways of telling us to do the same thing! Then they tried calling us, as if somehow they could surpass the whole no dial tone problem.

Finally, hours later and after speaking to two people in India, my brother said something complicated enough that the tech support gave up and transferred us back to America. Phew. However, it really didn't matter. After another hour with Jersey, we still had no dial tone.

Andrew just called Vonage again today (we got a new router) to try one more time with our phone (thought maybe it had improved a little since the rain stopped). The guy of course couldn't hear him--he said he would call us back--that should fix the problem, right? At that point, Andrew kind of got upset. Why would that make any difference? It's our phone line! He never called back.