Whew, the website is back online.  That was a far more arduous process than I envisioned.  I don’t have much bad to say about uverse as far as the service goes, it’s been fine the year we’ve had it at our rental house.  Unfortunately, they also advertise the ability to quickly and painlessly move your service to a new location;  Not so much!  For over three weeks now I’ve been talking to those people every few days, with widely varying levels of civility.  They absolutely insist that there is existing service in our (brand new) house and the previous owners need to disconnect it before they can move ours.  And, you know, it’s possible, I’ll actually concede that.  The construction trailer was sitting on our lot for a long time, and they could have had service I suppose.  The builder says that has been long disconnected though, and after many conversations with both sides I tend to lean towards believing the builder.  At any rate, they finally conceded to move the service, and came out Monday.  Lo and behold, the installer says “oh, they haven’t run fiber to your house yet, we’ll have to get them out here first.”  At this point I escalated the situation to Donette, who immediately called and went Morelock on them.  Much to my surprise, the fiber trucks were onsite that very afternoon.  Wow, all good…  Until we told them to get the installer back out.  Nope, gotta reschedule, it’ll be a while.  Well, I actually had all the equipment from the rental house, so I got to thinking, “I wonder what would happen if I plugged this into this and that into that and….”  A few hours later everything was up and running.  The only pitfall was the phone line.  You had to call some automated service to “activate” it.  It told me there was a problem with the line and I needed to call 800-blah-blah to get it fixed.  I foolishly went down that path, and a full hour later finally got off the phone with the nice (if incredibly maddening) lady on the other end.  One full hour of her begging me not to hang up, she almost had it fixed, she’s working with her supervisor, there is a software issue, blah blah blah blah, while I was screaming in her ear, “THE PHONE WORKS FINE!!  WE ARE ON THE PHONE!!!  CAN YOU HEAR ME???  I CAN HEAR YOU!!!!  WE ARE TALKING ON THE PHONE!!!”  Poor lady.  She’s supposed to call me back Thursday to “fix” the problem.  (On my cell naturally, since our home phone isn’t working according to her.)  I really don’t want to talk to anybody anymore, but I am morbidly curious to see if she actually calls me back so I agreed to that.  If she does, she will be the one and only out of every other “manager, supervisor, retention specialist, etc” to actually make good on that promise.  I look forward to the end of our contract so I can dump them and get Xfinity.  (At which point the same issues will no doubt start all over again, just with a different company.)

Other than that major (in my world) issue, I can say the move has gone very smoothly.  I would then, however, be lying.  It has been quite possibly the single worst experience of my life.  That might also be a slight exaggeration.  I guess it’s just that moving stinks.  The painter took two days longer than anticipated, and we had to work around him and all his equipment.  On one hand, it was great that he could fit us in on very short notice and paint the entire inside of the house.  On the other, it was a huge pain working around all the plastic and tarps and ladders and wet walls, and all that mess.  I also somehow got the extremely naive idea in my head that Donette and I could easily handle shuttling our household the mere four miles from the rental, by ourselves.  Luckily one of my friends recognized this plan as a delusional fantasy, and took it upon himself to show up and help.  It was a longgggg two days, and we still have an imposing amount of belongings at the rental.  But, for now anyway, I have Internet service, so at least the odds of survival have increased greatly.