Yay! And I survived. There was stuff I needed to do, people to contact, but all in all, I survived. It is a relief though to have it back. We were only without it for what, 4 or 5 days? Still felt like a long time. You see, I woke up the morning that this whole thing started to no internet signal. The modem was plugged in, but no lights. I unplugged it, plugged it back in twice, and finally the lights came back on, but no internet signal, and our network wasn't even on the list of available connections. I reset the modem, same result. (This also happened to same day as the one lone cellphone we have in the house died from heat stroke, so we had to find a phone too.) The hope was that since we got this at the Ogden mall, we could simply take it in there, explain what happened and maybe they would exchange it for us. We drove the mall (on one of the hottest days of the summer - 105 degrees O.o) only to find they weren't there. We found out that they moved to Layton Hills mall, about 30 minutes away. That might be doable. Luckily we were able to pull up the Xfinity 1 hour free pass to activate the new cell phone, since, you know, you have to have either the internet or another phone to call to activate it.
Later on that night, I had the fun experience of talking to CenturyLink while she tried this and that to test it to see if the modem was bad or not. (And I had to turn off the fans to be able to hear which meant sitting there sweating bullets.) 30 minutes or so later, it was determined that the modem was bad. I asked her if it would be possible to exchange the bad modem at the mall, and she said it would be fine if they had one with the same serial number. After some conversation back and forth with me telling her where the mall was, and her asking me for the number (which I didn't have) and the zip code for Layton (which I didn't know and couldn't find in the phone book since apparently the Ogden phone books don't list other county or near by city zips like they do in Owensboro), she simply looked it up herself and called them to see if they had what we were looking for. No one answered (it was about 7 or so in the evening) so she gave me the number and told me to call them the next day. And, if they didn't have what we needed, to call her back via her direct phone number which she gave me.
The next day, we found out that they did have 2 modems in stock, but they were no longer in Layton. They had moved to Murray, which is in SLC and way too long of a drive. Next step was to call CenturyLink again to tell them we would need one mailed. After another 20 minute conversation with the same lady going through the same steps we had gone through the night before, she determined again that the modem was bad. I shouldn't have gotten irritated, but I did. It didn't seem to matter to her that we had already gone through this all the night before. I guess though that our account hadn't gotten updated. And I figured that she was just doing her job, and it would really suck to be in customer service, so there was no good reason to not be anything but polite. She was after all, very nice, and while a little hard to understand the thicker her Asian accent got, she was a pleasant employee to deal with. (We have all dealt with those that make calling in about a problem feel like we had just committed a serious crime to which there is no pardon.)
And surprise, surprise, the box appeared today before lunch. :D So now, I can get caught up with all the internet-y type of things I have going on.
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