Con-artist Bobby Lyman of Las Vegas says: Trust Me!

Would you buy broadband from this man? Plus, Bobby Lyman only looks like this from the neck-down.

Hey Gang, Radical Ed here to update you on what has been up with the blog.  Since the reason for the outage was as technical in nature as anything, I have been asked to file a report.

The short technical answer is that due to a con-artist, the Cobb's lost all connectivity to their house where we all work on the Cigna War Journal.  The Cobbs had a pretty useful Internet connection until a con-man going under the alias "Bobby Lyman" came through on some kind of sales-drive, falsely claiming he was from the Internet provider CenturyLink, one of the DSL providers in the Las Vegas area. Kurt Russell did a fantastic impersonation of how Bobby Lyman operates in the 1980 classic Used Cars:

 

Here is the business card he left them:

At first glance it looks real but common sense says that nobody truly represents that many companies. Old Bobby there is hoping no one will notice that a "general manager" who represents the biggest in the Telecom world only has a Gmail address.  Really.

In any event, according to the Cobb's, this character shows up at their door and after unsuccessfully trying to force his way in makes the following claims:

1. "Your neighbourhood is due for an upgrade soon that will leave everyone that upgrades their account with 3x the bandwidth at the same price they are paying now." According to CenturyLink, this alleged upgrade won't exist in the Cobb's area for years. If Bobby had truly been from CenturyLink, you would think he would know that. Unless he was just plain lying. Which is more likely kids?
2. "Part of this upgrade package includes Prism." Folks, Prism is a cheezy scheme by CenturyLink to sell the same bandwidth to you twice, once for Internet and then again for the same bandwidth for Prism. You see you already pay for all of the bandwidth you are going to get so when someone sells you cable TV over Internet, the only way it will get to you is down through the pipe you are already paying for! To get the TV to your home with any kind of reliability, they have to force you to give up much of your Internet bandwidth, a flat 50% in the case of Prism. This means this "upgrade" to the broadband connection would result in only getting half of the bandwidth they are getting now!
3. "I represent CenturyLink. I need to come into your home and inspect your equipment." CenturyLink never heard of him; the Cobb's called and checked. When you see how many huge firms he has on his card, it is little wonder.

The Cobbs's rightfully viewed his grand offer with suspicion but since there was no risk (oh if they had only known) they let it happen, thinking more bandwidth would be good for the blog.  They didn't really care about TV (Prism) or landlines, etc and told Bobby Lyman this but that didn't deter him from then trying to convince them that they needed the TV to get the bandwidth (which makes no sense since the Prism service would have resulting in them losing half the bandwidth they already pay for. Bobby said they could shut off the Prism service in 30 days if they did not like it.

So big day of the upgrade arrives along with the technician who discovers the Cobb's are already at the max they can physically get in their neighbourhood and adding Prism would only make things worse. After some discussion, they agreed no harm, no foul and the technical left, cancelling the upgrade.

Mysteriously 5 minutes later, ALL Internet connection with the world was lost. They called CenturyLink tech support to report the outage, stupidly thinking that they could just reverse whatever they had just done at the central office. No, this was too close to the end of the day so some knob of a tech-support person told them he needed to transfer them to "customer care" to resolve this who then told them they had to speak to tech support and that all tech support people had gone home for the day, please try to call back tomorrow. They think this brain-trusts name was "Aaron" something. They are trying to make us believe that a national ISP has no  24/7 tech support. When it became clear that the clue-meter at CenturyLink support lived somewhere near zero, the Cobb's hung up and called back the next day. They were then were run through the ridiculous gauntlet of DSL modem factory resets and other pointless exercises to determine what was wrong and after telling the tech support person for probably the 12th time that the problem was not local, tech support got testy.

 "I can continue this run-around or I can send out a technician in 24-48 hours. Which would you like?" What a choice: argue with an ass or spend 2 more days with no connection. Talk about damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Finally things got escalated. While CenturyLink never claimed culpability and made it seem like a miracle of science why the connection was broken, after "investigating it" for an hour, the Internet was restored with no explanation.

CenturyLink's highly-trained technical staff finds the scapegoat for the outage

So maybe it was UFO's, the Smog Monster or chem-trails but the bottom line is this entire outage was the direct result of the con-man Bobby Lyman attempting to trick disabled people out of their money.  If he had not done what he had, nothing that followed would have either.  What is worse is that the neighborhood that the Cobb's live in is what you Americans refer to as "gentrified" which is another way of labelling an area where most people trust each other and don't know enough about tech to tell when a saleman is lying to them. Since most are on fixed incomes, someone like Bobby Lyman is worse than just a scam-artist. He hurts people where they live and don't have the means to do much about it.

So if you see this man come to your door, trying to sell you anything and don't have someone like Edward handy, do not trust anything he says. As a matter of fact, the cheapest way out of any encounter with Bobby Lyman is to kick him out of your home; if he gets his way, you will be paying money for services that you don't end up with.

The Cobb's have some even bigger news for you but I will leave that to Mrs. Cobb....

Peace,

Radical Edward
CWJTechTeam at Gmail dot com