Advanced Dynamic Ramblings

I’ve worked with Qwest many times, and have generally been pleased with their support. This most recent debacle, however, had my blood boiling.

Set up:

One of my clients was unable to send or receive emails on Friday, just before Memorial Day weekend. He called his email provider, Qwest, before he called me, and during the call, the Qwest rep decided that the appropriate solution was to completely remove his account from Qwest.net and set up a new MSN account at q.com. Unfortunately, he didn’t have enough information to put the brakes on this “solution”. Don’t even ask me how MSN relates to q.com… It’s beyond me, I don’t care to peel back the layers to figure it out, and I shall remain intentionally ignorant on this topic.

With the Qwest.net account deleted, and a new q.com account in it’s place, all incoming emails to the qwest.net addresses were bouncing back to their sender.

Tue after Memorial Day Weekend:

I send an email to said client (unaware of the specific problem) and it bounces immediately. I realize that the problem is with Qwest, and not a particular setting in his email program. I call Qwest and begin the process of trying to reactivate the Qwest.net account that died on Friday. After 3 seperate calls totalling approximately 3 hours, Qwest is unable to achieve this trivial task. We shift gears and set up free Gmail accounts. My client says that he can manage updating all of his contacts with his new email address. Later that day however, he realizes that one of the qwest.net email addresses was used for making upcoming travel arrangements. Many emails had been sent out, and there was pretty much no way to reach out and reliably update all those contacts with the new Gmail address. I agree to do battle with Qwest.

This is the recording of that call:

I’ve edited out the hold times, but it’s still quite long…

Audio of call