U.S. Senate See Full Big Line

(D) J. Hickenlooper*

(R) Somebody

80%

20%

(D) Phil Weiser

(D) Joe Neguse

(D) Jena Griswold

60%

60%

40%↓

Att. General See Full Big Line

(D) M. Dougherty

(D) Alexis King

(D) Brian Mason

40%

40%

30%

Sec. of State See Full Big Line
(D) A. Gonzalez

(D) George Stern

(R) Sheri Davis

50%↑

40%

30%

State Treasurer See Full Big Line

(D) Brianna Titone

(R) Kevin Grantham

(D) Jerry DiTullio

60%

30%

20%

CO-01 (Denver) See Full Big Line

(D) Diana DeGette*

(R) Somebody

90%

2%

CO-02 (Boulder-ish) See Full Big Line

(D) Joe Neguse*

(R) Somebody

90%

2%

CO-03 (West & Southern CO) See Full Big Line

(R) Jeff Hurd*

(D) Somebody

80%

40%

CO-04 (Northeast-ish Colorado) See Full Big Line

(R) Lauren Boebert*

(D) Somebody

90%

10%

CO-05 (Colorado Springs) See Full Big Line

(R) Jeff Crank*

(D) Somebody

80%

20%

CO-06 (Aurora) See Full Big Line

(D) Jason Crow*

(R) Somebody

90%

10%

CO-07 (Jefferson County) See Full Big Line

(D) B. Pettersen*

(R) Somebody

90%

10%

CO-08 (Northern Colo.) See Full Big Line

(R) Gabe Evans*

(D) Manny Rutinel

(D) Yadira Caraveo

50%

40%↑

30%

State Senate Majority See Full Big Line

DEMOCRATS

REPUBLICANS

80%

20%

State House Majority See Full Big Line

DEMOCRATS

REPUBLICANS

95%

5%

Generic selectors
Exact matches only
Search in title
Search in content
Post Type Selectors
January 09, 2009 04:16 PM UTC

Open Line Friday!

  • 42 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

“Sometimes I cringe at playing sound bites of myself.”

–Rush Limbaugh

Comments

42 thoughts on “Open Line Friday!

  1. We’ll we’re now on day 3 of no internet from Qwest. And because of how our email system is configured email to us does not bounce, it’s held in a queue. So anyone sending us email thinks we’re ignoring them.

    Any customer reporting a problem or with a question – we’ve now ignored them for 2 days. That may be standard operating procedure for Qwest, but we answer all questions within 2 hours.

    It also has brought a halt to most sales. Virtually all sales queries come to us by email. Would you buy from a company that won’t answer your questions?

    We have all been discussing here the severe limits on what the state can do in this economic downturn. But here is something the state can do.

    Ubiquitous high-speed broadband is a central part of Obama’s stimulus package. And rightly so. But a key part of that is having the broadband provided by a competent organization.

    The state has a compelling interest in who provides broadband in this state. And they have the power to insist on competence in the monopoly they deliver to the phone company.

    I think the legislature should consider investigating just how bad Qwest’s service is. And if it’s found to be significantly detrimental to the state, to insist that they either replace the top management with competent people, or grant the monopoly to a better run company.

    Qwest screws our work connection one way or another every 3 – 6 months. My home DSL goes down every 6 – 9 months. We can’t be the only one they consistently do this to.

    And make no mistake, this costs the state jobs. Reduced sales means fewer jobs. And every effort we have to invest in Qwest issues at our end is effort that is taken away from new product development and additional sales.

    1. That is beyond frustrating. About 75% of my business for our tourist season comes via email and usually starts to really rev up in May. This happened to me once and I couldn’t believe how many reservations I lost because I couldn’t access my email for four days.

      Just try and hang in there. I feel for you, my friend. I really do.  

    2. After a couple of days of serious lightning strikes my DSL, though plugged into a high quality surge protector, quit. First, Qwest questioned whether it was really out, sent their tech guy to my house (outside) the next day. I don’t know how , but he reached agreement with me that it was out. I suspect it was just because he lives here and was aware of the lightning and may have thought it was the best way to assist me. I then called Qwest again and requested a DSL modem to be overnighted to me. Their reply- “We don’t do that. It will be 5-7 working days.” As I sat around getting really pissed (I was their first customer in our ‘ville) I realized that our cable company, Bresnan, had always been more responsive. About 3 that afternoon I called them and they came the very next day and installed a cable modem. Immediately after calling Bresnan I called Qwest and told them to keep their modem and cancel me. Their only efficiency proved to be that the mailing order had already occurred. True to their word the modem arrived 7 working days after they sent it. I got billed by Qwest for 2-3 months before they finally got it cancelled and they even tried to tell me it would be “better” for me if I paid it each month and awaited a refund.  

    3. I go nuts w/o personal email after part of a day.

      Off to Comcast?

      The only trouble I ever had with Qwest DSL was the need to reboot the modem.  Would sometimes work fine for months, then other times it burped daily or more frequently.

      Keeping my eyes and ears open to stories, I think cable is much more reliable. But their cheapest broadband is twice the price of regular DSL here with Verizon.  Verizon even has a decent slow DSL for only $15/mo with ISP.  Qwest, nada.  

      1. I just set up business everything when I moved (I run a business out of my house) and they:

        1.  Screwed up the installation, that’s why I get kicked off with every call,

        2.  Gave me a number that used to belong to a towing company.  So I get calls in the afternoon from pissed off people with blocked driveways or whatever (run downstairs and reset) and I get middle of the night calls from the recently towed.  “Is this (one of three towing companies)?”

        “No, sorry.”

        “Are you kidding?”  Sometimes it ends here and sometimes I get an slurred chewing out that makes me happy they don’t have a car.

        They haven’t fixed it in three and a half weeks.  I got a flyer from Comcast, $30 phone (all the bells and whistles), free basic cable for a year, reasonable internet.  I’m taking that deal and sleeping more.  Hurray!

    4. Have they told you what happened and why they can’t get the connection back?

      After 4 hours of outage I start asking very pointed questions of my service providers.  3 days is the longest I’ve ever heard of an outage on DSL (or, for that matter, any other situation short of a fiber cut…)

      If you aren’t already, you might also gently remind Qwest that their (in)action is costing you $X per day in business, and start muttering about service guarantees – assuming the contract has said guarantees.

      1. I know it’s tough to win something like this with only tentative sales lost, but as PR sez, if there is any kind of uptime guarentee, it’s a possibility.

    5. I am curious about what are you doing to put pressure on Qwest to solve the problem. Have you physically shown up in the office of your rep and/or their service department ?  Why don’t you threaten to sue them for the business you have lost ? Why not call whomever the manager involved is, and request an appointment today ?  If your business is down and you have nothing better to do why not ?

      Maybe that’s not your style, but I wonder if you get the problem solved faster if you push them harder and refuse to be ignored.  I don’t know, maybe you’ve tried all of that already.

    6. Ok, they finally got a rep out here an hour ago and after 10 minutes – we had a connection. So the good news is we’re back up and running. Sales is busy calling everyone we ignored for 3 days while on the support side we had just 1 email (the advantage of having very solid & easy to use code).

      And what was it? Apparently someone at Qwest changed our password so when we tried to connect it failed our modem – but did not say it was a login error. So we went 2½ days without internet because 1) Some moron at Qwest changed our password, 2) The error we received was not a login error, and 3) Qwest couldn’t bother to spend the 10 minutes required to look at it from their end and tell us it was a login issue.

      As to how did I get them to move? I told one of their VPs that if we were still down Monday morning, I would hold a press conference with 2 lecturns up front, one with my name on it and one with the name of the Qwest CEO. And he was welcome to either attend and respond – or it could remain empty while I asked it questions.

      I hate to imagine how slow the response is for people who don’t have a way to hold their feet to the fire. Qwest is clearly a job killer in this state.

        1. I have contacted Claire Levy & Rollie Heath to ask them to have the legislature determine if Qwest is causing enough problems of sufficient magnitude that it is a measurable cause of additional unemployment.

      1. Seems they went on a crusade on passwords that were used to set up accounts.  Mine goes back two years.  

        So they sent out an email saying they were going to kabosh my pw and I needed to go in and make up a new one……..after they already did it.

        Of course, I couldn’t retrieve my email because my pw no longer worked!

        Sheer genius.

    1. 114 in favor of Impeachment, one against, one voting present and one apparently not present to vote (the 118th seat in the Illinois House is  vacant due to the recent death of a Democratic member from the East St. Louis area).

      I can understand the dead member not voting here … after all they are St. Louis not Chicago.

      The one voting against … I’d like to hear that story.

      The one voting ‘present’ … Obama’s last vote in Springfield was what 3.5 years ago?

      1. Rep. Milt Patterson (D-Chicago) was the “no” vote.  I’m guessing he’ll be under some scrutiny shortly.

        Don’t know who the “present” vote was, but unless it’s someone like the Speaker who may have a procedural reason to vote “present”…

    2. It could have saved the Dems a lot of embarrassment with Burris.

      Now the only question is if there’s going to be a grand jury indictment, and if Blago will be doing jail time.

  2. I got over the hump yesterday. It’s still a battle every minute though. The psychological addiction, I think, is much worse than the physical addiction.

    So I’m trudging along. We’ll see if I can make it when I go back to school next week and everyone at Auraria is smoking.

    1. Great job !  Everyday you go without you are releasing yourself from its clutches.  It WILL get easier.  Keep busy, that also helps.

      And if that dosen’t work…

      Run out of your building pulling out your hair screaming Holy Mary Mother of God why hast thou forsaken me ? at the top of your lungs.  That one worked for me too   ; )

      Just kidding – keep it up !

    2. ….but getting past the 72 hour mark means you’ve made great progress! Stick with it!

      I tried quitting several times when I was in the Army, and they only way I broke my 2-pack a day habit was on 45-day rotation to the NTC in California. I didn’t pack any smokes in my Ruck or Track, and everyone else I could bum off of ran out after week two.

      Chronic Sleep depredation didn’t help, but sweating my ass off in the desert seemed to kill the cravings after week three.

      That, and a ton of Jolt Cola…

      1. I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t mean it.  I guess cessation affects people in different ways.  

        I was living alone in a 400 sq ft apartment in Tokyo, had recently lost my job, and was being sued when I quit but I still find your story more interesting !

    3. until my doctor forced me to stay off of gluten, turns out it was making me really sick.  The longer you stay off of it, the sicker you get if you slip.  All those years of trying to get off for vanity I was only able to go a day, maybe.  Now I’m not even tempted because I think of hives, my face being red, migraines, etc.

      So with that in mind, did you know that when you stop smoking for more than three days, starting again makes your nose bleed?  Gushes.  Even if you’re lucky enough to not bleed to death it’s so unattractive your wife will leave you, you’ll never be able to meet another girl, hang out with friends, or hold a job because you’ll perpetually have a tissue shoved up your nose.  This is serious business, so don’t test it, just trust me.  You’ll get so sick.

      1. After 3 days, you start regaining your sense o smell. If you start again, you can smell the godawful smoker stench. That’s probbably what causes the nosebleeds!

    4. Avoiding the time points of the day and the locations at those points when smoking happened is how I made it for the first month or two.  You will find out what the word “habit” is now.  Habit is something you will do without thinking about it.  Such as reaching in the pocket to pull out the pack and firing up whenever you walked out to the mailbox or something.

      You will need to be totally aware of what is happening all day and night. There were many times I was about to fire up and realized what I was doing just in time.  

      1. The psychology of addiction has always fascinated me…and there’s a lot of good material out there for those who want to read about it. Taking that further, there’s a real spiritual dimension to it as well, that gets to the “art of mindfullness”, which brings a person into a more full and present relationship in virtually every aspect of one’s daily doings. So, breaking addictions is almost always coupled with healing relations.

        Not to mention the warts, boils, bad breath, and all the other negatives that accompany giving in to habits as droll reminds us in his post.

        1. I have avoided saying anything about a sad end to the husband of a friend of mine.  Last October he finally decided to quit smoking.  He was in his mid-50’s and had smoked all his life.  

          The week after he quit he decided to go to the doctor and see what could be done with his cough until it cleared up after a stopping smoking.  The chest x-ray showed advance cancer in the lungs and further x-rays and MRI showed that it had spread through out his body, including his liver.

          All the hope and praying in the world could not undo the massive invasion of cancer.  He tried to fight against all odds during the last two plus months.

          This evening was his last.

            1. My condolences, also. I had a friend for whom the same thing happened, although she was in her early sixities. She was a smoking buddy of mine for years and years, before I quit.  She quit just a year before she was diagnosed.  It is a god awful habit.

              There was a great paragraph I remember from a light fiction book written back in the sixities, called “The man who knew Kennedy.”  The main character’s life had touched JFK’s during the war and the was the theme.

              However, at one point, he decides to give up cigarettes.

              There is this real poignant paragraph which is a homage to smoking.  He talks about all the tough times when a cigarette was the only thing he had to get him through; he remembers all the times he smoked (and drank) with friends; and then he finishes his last cigeratte, tosses the butt and it is over.

    5. You can wave at the frozen smokers from inside. Congratulations. I think we ex-smokers, as well as those current trying to quit, know just how hard the last four days must have been for you.

      Doesn’t Auraria have a student health clinic with support services?  Years ago, I took some computer classes at Metro. It seemed to me that I had to pay student fees even for one course, and that there was access to the health clinic included in the fees…along with an RTD student pass.  

Leave a Comment

Recent Comments


Posts about

Donald Trump
SEE MORE

Posts about

Rep. Lauren Boebert
SEE MORE

Posts about

Rep. Gabe Evans
SEE MORE

Posts about

Colorado House
SEE MORE

Posts about

Colorado Senate
SEE MORE

76 readers online now

Newsletter

Subscribe to our monthly newsletter to stay in the loop with regular updates!