Saying Go-Go-Go away to SBC Yahoo…saying Go-Go-Go to GoDaddy.com…Ernestine lives with Technical Support Staff of SBC Yahoo,hence our reasons to drop them

 By Daniel Hines
Publisher
www.TodaysSeniorsNetwork.com 

First of all, I like, I mean really like telephone operators.  My Mother worked for more than three decades as the night and chief operator at two small-town independent phone companies.   

That’s why I could always laugh at Ernestine, the acid-tongued switchboard operator character developed by Lily Tomlin.  It was funny to see how she frustrated callers. 

Unfortunately, it’s not so funny when it happens in real life.  And, just as there are Elvis and UFO sightings, I can report that I know where Ernestine has landed—it’s as the model for the technical support staff of SBC Yahoo’s small business web hosting.   

But whereas Ernestine was funny because she was dealing with fictional situations, the SBC Yahoo people are rude.  Add to that a degree of incompetence and unwillingness to help,  you can see that there was an edge to Ernestine that makes me wonder if she really was that funny.  

It’s probably not surprising that the spirit of Ernestine should end up with a company owned at least in part by one of the Bell family, and that her spirit is now exemplified not by telephone operators but by rude, unhelpful tech support people. 

Why, you ask am I so upset.  Here’s the story in a capsule: 

For five years, we have had SBC as our web host. As our site has grown, the SBC service was unable to handle the growing traffic and more sophisticated communications on the site itself.  

Hence the decision to move to SBC Yahoo—and the start of a miserable week of insults, accusations and moves that caused our site to be out of service. 

We were assured by the sales staff that there would be no down time because SBC Yahoo had developed a system to ensure a seamless transfer.  But that, we later learned, was not true.  

So we feared our more than 1000 pages had been lost, so we were frantically looking for some answers.
Enter Dino, our first technical contact.  After first saying I was not being truthful about the representation of the sales staff, Dino proceeded to lecture me on how I should have saved a copy on my hard drive and published from that.  No matter that I had acted according to direction given me by SBC Yahoo itself.  As I asked him why the transfer had not taken place, he scolded me again saying that what was my problem, didn’t I understand that SBC and SBC Yahoo’s computers were different. 

After being treated like a dummy with comments from Dino continuing, I was transformed from a tranquil, 66-year-old Grandfather, into a snarling monster, letting loose with some of the harshest epitaphs  I had used since I was in Korea more than 40 years ago.  Dino pulled the plug on me. 

I cooled down and called back about an hour latter.  This time, I got  Jase (his spelling, not mine).  I explained my plight to him, but to no avail.  He also lectured me on procedures of publishing, etc.  He said there  was nothing he could do, and when I asked to speak to someone else, he coolly told me that he “was someone else” and I would have to talk with him or no one.  This time I pulled the plug. 

In panic, I called SBC.  Here I got a very nice, polite and helpful young man who said it was not too late to pull the site off of SBC’s computers.  He walked me through the process, and was very helpful.   

When done, I was ready to give SBC Yahoo another try.  Now a new problem arose.  SBC Yahoo kept timing out, so with trembling hands I once again dialed technical support (my key pads on my phone were wearing thin from being pushed so much.) 

Enter Edmond, who while basically polite, suggested  that I didn’t know what program I was using, and suggested that I really didn’t have Front Page 2003.  I told him that I had been using Front Page since my first copy of Front Page 97.  He still didn’t believe that I knew what I was talking about.  Time to end that conversation. 

Finally, after another two hours of despair, the site published and things seemed to be fine.  But not so fast.  There were new problems of files not transferring and a different look for pages.  So, stupid me, I attempted to reinstall Front Page extensions.   

The result—a disaster.  It turns out that Edmond had gone into my site during our conversation, set up a user id “test” and because he had gotten into the page, had no trouble accessing the site, hence his doubting that I knew that I was working with Front Page. 

The only problem—he had not removed his name, and now I was denied access to my own site.   

What to do, what to do.  If I called SBC Yahoo again, I would fit to a T Einstein’s definition of madness and insanity—doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.   

So, since I had recently worked with GoDaddy.com on a different site, I decided to take the plunge, and establish an account with them.  This time, I uploaded my files before changing domain name servers, and only afterwards redirected my visitors. 

Oh yes, there was some downtime—but I am confident that it will be worth it. Visitors will not have the benefit of faster, larger capabilities, but more importantly, this tired old man will have the benefit of courteous treatment, competent personnel who on many calls already made, have treated me with courtesy, patience and understanding.  

So good-bye to SBC Yahoo, Dino, Jase, Edmond and all the rest of those Ernestine-wannabes.  Next to go: Switches from SBC DSL to Charter Pipeline and changing of phone service from SBC to Vonage.  And a heads-up for Seniors—you deserve respect and in the case of hosting and other services, you are better served by GoDaddy.com than by SBC Yahoo.