I was sitting in my office checking email this Sunday morning when suddenly I couldn’t send email.\u00a0 Oh I thought, my email service must be down.\u00a0 No problem, I’ll check on my eBay auctions.\u00a0 Nothing.\u00a0 I enter the IP address of my HughesNet Gen4 device and run the little test it has, zero packet loss.\u00a0 Click the customer care link, nothing.\u00a0 Okay, now it’s time to call.\u00a0 Oh wait, I have this thing auto billing a credit card.\u00a0 There is no paper invoice with a customer service number on it. (*^(*&^(*&!$#%#<\/p>\n
Hmmm, back in the day when we used to have long distance companies advertising you could hear a pin drop on their lines (despite the truly worthless local service lines your phone was connecting through no less) we used to have a toll free directory number.\u00a0 I wonder if it still works?\u00a0 Yep!<\/p>\n
800-555-1212<\/p>\n
Of course HughesNet couldn’t tell me what the outage was or when it would be fixed.\u00a0 It took them a good 20 minutes of checking EVERYTHING else with my account before they checked to see if there was an outage.\u00a0 This is the second complete outage I have had with HughesNet Gen4 in roughly a year.\u00a0 Both times I have had to burn at least 20 minutes on the phone with a service rep running through EVERYTHING on a check list BEFORE they bothered to look at any system event announcements.\u00a0 They don’t even have a spot on their couldn’t care less about the customer home page for “system event” announcements.<\/p>\n
Still.\u00a0 How many people under the age of 40 know there is a toll free directory service?\u00a0 Admittedly it didn’t fix my Internet and it didn’t make HughesNet customer care work any better, but at least I knew it wasn’t anything on my end once I made the call.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"