We’ve got threads for things that infuriate you and worst designed products and so on, how about one for the reverse: experiences that turned out better than you expected.
I’ll start with my internet service. I recently ditched Comcast and switched to AT&T Fiber. My main motivation was that Comcast has been having a lot of outages in my area; seems like at least once a month or so we’d lose our internet for a few hours. Anecdotal reports from my neighbors claim that AT&T almost never has outages.
So last month I signed up for AT&T. The installer came out to my house just a few days after I signed up. He did a fine job installing the jack and wiring in my house. He then discovered that there was some incorrect wiring on the pole outside my house, so he called an engineer to come assist him. The two of them spent a good 5 hours working on it, climbing several poles, running new wires, etc. They finally got it done and working the same day. My cost: nothing. The $100 installation fee had been waived.
Then I got my first bill. I was paying $117 per month for Comcast. AT&T is costing me $65.
And to top it off, there was a signup deal from AT&T that gives me $350 in Amazon credit, which pays for over 5 months of the service. AT&T also would have paid any cancellation fee from Comcast, although there wasn’t any.
We were paying Comcast a crazy amount of money for tv and WiFi. We were also paying Verizon Wireless out the wazoo for our cellular service. We dropped them both, and went with T-Mobile for our phones and WiFi. We also switched to streaming services. We are saving money, and Comcast internet would go out on us now and then for no obvious reason. We’ve had no problems with T-Mobile. I’d call it a win.
I also got fed up a couple of years ago with the pricing and quality of meat at our local grocery stores. I switched us over to a subscription service and haven’t looked back since, we’ve been very pleased with it.
I was going to post about this. I did my passport renewal about three weeks ago. Entirely on line. Just uploaded a new photo and paid the fee. They said 4 to 6 weeks. I got my new passport in 1 week. The whole thing was incredibly easy. (and during a shutdown)
My neighbor, who I figured must hate me because of my unsightly yard, has extremely barky dogs (Jack Russells). They stay out more or less all day, barking their heads off. He’s more or less deaf, meaning I hear his dogs and he doesn’t. All day.
Part of the problem is his fence has two holes at dog level, a bit smaller than a dog’s head, that they look out of and yap out of. This got much worse when the guy across the street from the dog-yapping holes got 4 dogs himself. They barked at each other All. Day. Long.
Finally one night, at wit’s end, I drained some of the raw anger out of myself and courageously knocked on his door. His lovely wife answered and we had instant rapport, her sympathizing with me and commenting they were terrible dogs – HIS dogs and not hers, she insisted – and that she’d do something about it. Lo the very the next day, the dog-yapping holes were boarded over. They still bark, but like 10% of what they used to get up to. It’s glorious, and I’d figured it would have ended badly. Instead, I’m going over to their house for drinks this weekend. I’m shopping for a really nice bottle of wine.
Somehow I got the idea that you needed 4 years of a foreign language to get into college. I struggled badly in Spanish, and got my only D in high school the last semester. However, it turned out that my 4 years of suffering meant I was exempt from the university’s foreign language requirement.
I went to Florida a few months ago to see my in-laws. I thought it was going to suck. It would be the first time my five year old was on a plane, I imagined getting dragged around everywhere and having to do stuff on other people’s schedules and hating it.
It turned out to be a lovely trip. My son was great on the plane, and it was a joy to see him encounter so many firsts: first beach trip, first planetarium, first museum, first aquarium. It was a lovely town and we took things at an easy pace. We spent great time with my husband’s sister, whom we are close to, and her daughter and wife.
It wasn’t perfect - my son was super hyperactive the first two days and my FIL’s air conditioner was on the fritz - nights were really hot!
I had a notice from the IRS that I owed $30K in taxes for two years ago (notice in 2017 for tax year 2015).
My then employer’s stock plan administrator was the source of the problem. I simply sent in a copy of the transaction from their site and a letter explaining what had happened.
The got a letter a few months later saying the explanation had been accepted. I was gearing up for a months or years long battle and hiring an EA or CPA to represent me.
I have had two notices and one audit from the IRS. All were pretty painless. The other notice, they were actually correct and I did owe a few thousand. I had completely missed a fairly large 1099 from a brokerage. The audit ended up with me getting $9 back. Something to do with a state income tax refund that TurboTax didn’t handle correctly.
There are a lot of things I dislike about camping and sleeping in a tent (smoky campfires, bugs, hard lumpy ground, all the things to set up and take down, etc.). But my wife likes it and I usually end up having fun despite my reservations.
How’s the speed? We hate Comcast, cut our cable years ago, but we kept Comcast internet because my understanding was AT&T internet was much slower. I don’t think we have fiber available in our area, though.
Get an inflatable mattress. I have a queen-size inflatable mattress with its own battery-powered pump that my wife and I sleep on when we camp. Tent camping game changer.
I had the Comcast Gigabit plan. That was a nominal 1000 Mbps download and a piddling 35 Mbps upload. My new AT&T plan is also gigabit, but fiber is symmetric, so it’s 1000 Mbps both ways, a huge improvement in upload performance over Comcast for half the price.
I just ran a speed test and got 1338 download and 1276 upload.
But if fiber is not available to you and you’re looking at DSL, you are correct that you won’t get anything like these speeds.
When I got my new fridge a few weeks ago, it turned out that Home Depot outsources the delivery to a logistic firm rather than doing it themselves. For some reason I was Googling this outfit and I was shocked by all the one-star reviews and much of the criticism, like refusing to remove the old appliance as they were supposed to, general rudeness, property damage, and in one case allegedly just leaving the appliance in the driveway.
I was pleasantly surprised by having no issues with them whatsoever. Someone even called just shortly before they arrived to say they were on their way. Plus, I love the new fridge! The shiny stainless steel is gorgeous, and though it’s bigger than I really need it will make this family-type house more saleable. It was a bit of a gamble because Home Depot didn’t have a floor model on display, and this is not exactly the sort of thing you can return if you don’t like it!
In relation to the internet discussion, I have a good-news story there, too. One good thing is that the cable infrastructure here is relatively new because the neighbourhood is, too, and even if it wasn’t, Bell just recently installed fiber here. But up to 1.5 Gbps is available just on the copper coax.
The other bit of serendipitous news is that my cable modem is so old and obsolete that the ISP no longer bothers to “manage” it, meaning they don’t bother to limit its speed to what I’m paying for. Technically I’m grandfathered on an obsolete 150 Mbps plan, but the modem just goes ahead and runs as fast as it technically can, and usually gets me around 700 Mbps.
