technologically challenged?

I've been having telephone and computer problems for several days. The phone problems came to light when I tried to make a long distance phone call to a friend in New York State. I got a recording that gave me a customer service number to call. I thought that her phone was having problems, but it turned out to be mine. I called the number and went through the usual robot questions and answers for quite a while before I finally got a live person. She said she could not help me because the number I was calling was out of her area. (At this point, I thought the problem was on my friend's phone). The person I was talking to gave me another number to call.

When I reached a person at that number, he was only working on wireless and sent me back to the original number. When I reached a live person again at that number, she checked my phone and determined that they had no information of any account at that number. However, the company (Qwest) allowed another company (Primus?) to use their lines. That company was the one I had been using as my long distance carrier. I called their number, only to hear a recording that said I could contact them via fax, or email, or US mail or go onto their website. NO PHONE NUMBER! Imagine that - a phone company that won't talk on the phone!

I tried the website and they also had no records of any account in my name or number. I think I know what happened. A couple of months ago, I cancelled a credit card. I believe that card had the automatic payment to the phone company on it. Now, I would have thought that when the payment didn't reach the company, they would have tried to contact me about it. Seems logical to me - but evidently not to Primus. They never contacted me about missing payments or to say they were cancelling my account. A very strange way to do business.


The upshot is that I contact Verizon. They DO talk on the phone and are very helpful. I looked on line to see what their prices were, and then called them to get the new account set up. This seemed to work very well, although, of course, I had to go through the automatic stuff for a bit before I could reach a person. She took all the information and then said that she would transfer the call to an independent verifier to double check the information. The verifier started reading off the information and oops! the phone number was incorrect. So, he sent me back to the Verizon automatic number. As you can imagine, I was getting very frustrated. However, at this point, I got lucky and reached a live person quickly. All the information was there, including the correct phone number, so back I went to another verifier. This time everything was ok. Of course, I haven't tried using my long distance, so I am not sure that it is working. Guess I'll find out today. So much for the phone problems.


The computer problems started, I think, after I did one of those suggested clean-ups to make my computer run better. I don't know what all was eliminated, but bad things began to happen. First I couldn't get back on the internet. This, as it turned out, was because the phone jack had been disconnected when something fell behind a cabinet and hit the device that splits the connection between the phone and the computer. I got that fixed, but then my keyboard stopped working. This was caused by another loose connection, that probably happened when I was moving the CPU out to reach the back of it. I reconnected the keyboard, but then the mouse stopped working and my screen froze up. Only the screen saver was working. I eventually had to turn the computer off and let it rest. When I turned it back on, everything seemed to be ok, but I had a message from McAfee saying that my virus protection was not on. Although they told me it was off, I could not find any way to turn it on. At some point (I'm not sure exactly where) in this mess, I had reset my computer for the way it was at the beginning of the week before all went haywire. Evidently this did something to the virus protection - or maybe not. Anyway, I quit for the day and the next time I used the computer, everything worked ok and the virus protection was back on. I am beginning to become techno-phobic! I would keep my fingers crossed that everything continues to work, but it's really hard to type that way!