Today is weird

Yesterday/Last night we had ice/snow pile up around here. We’re little local fixed wireless ISP with access points scattered around the mountains so of course power is out to 2 of our 5 main hubs (failed power backups) and we’ve got nagios lit up with a bunch little access points that are down & who knows if they are independently down or down because their hub is down. (including mine so I got to spend “quality time” with my kids listening to them torment one another with WWI facts all night long & then wail because with no internet nothing can be ‘proven’). So I know I am walking into a shit show this morning.

We have to reschedule everyone because all of our field techs are being redeployed to run generators up mountains to bring back up points we can tell are down independently of the hubs. Rescheduling never goes smoothly. There can be 3 feet of snow on someone’s roof and they refuse to understand that my techs are not getting up on that roof. The road is a sheet of ice? Well why can’t you get here? DoT says only emergency vehicles on that road? This is an emergency!!

First weird thing of the day: No one complains. 2 people even beat me to it & called to say they’d like to reschedule because it doesn’t seem safe to get on their roof.

We get those calls out of the way and drift into our usual queues & channels. I do all queues mostly in the email & voice mail channels. Sometimes the chat channel as well for sales.

Second weird thing: I have a voice mail in the support queue from a lady wanting to update her credit card info. So she recites the whole card #, the exp date & CCV number plus the name & addy for the bill! I call her up, verify the card info & suggest, politely, that she not do that again, ever.

Third weird thing: I can only take 2 chats at a time so if you are 3rd in line you wait but you can type out your issue & have it all ready for me when I pick it up. I had about 8 people wanting to chat and it takes me about a hour to get through the stack. One person had quit the chat but my window of it stays open until I get to it. This guy left me his entire CC#, exp date & CCV number plus their SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER! Which we don’t need and never ask for. Just sitting there, in a chat window! These are not secure means of communicating!

Fourth weird thing: Later I am opening the mail & sorting payments and come to find a check from a customer for DIAL UP! Now, this ISP grew out of a local long distance company that started offering dial up internet 25ish years ago & 15 years ago they dropped the long distance & went full WISP, first converting the dial up people. But due to topography there were a dozen or so hanging on up to 2 years ago when the service we used for our dial up people went out of business. It was 7 months before we realized this & we only did when the new billing person was reconciling some old stuff & realized we hadn’t seen a bill in months, tried to reach out to them & discovered they no longer exist. But no one had ever called to complain they have no service so we assume the number they call still works. (I’ll be honest, we’d largely entirely forgotten we had dial up customers, there are 7 of them, until we learned the dial up service went out of business. They never call with service issues) A few months go by. No word from anyone. No bills from the service. I cancel all contracts & wipe out any outstanding charges. We figure these people have moved on. If they haven’t, well no one is charging us for it and it’s freakin’ dial up! Let them have it for free. Yet, without even receiving an invoice someone sent in a check for their semi annual payment.

Now I have to call them & have an awkward conversation about a service we don’t even know if it works & could the customer please tell me what the number they are dialing in on is? Because we lost that info 5 years ago.

I have a email sitting in the inbox with “update my CC” as the subject and I haven’t opened it yet because if another person has left me their full credit card info in an email I am going to lose it.