Of Vomit And Modems...
As I was getting ready for work Wednesday morning, my wife told me, "The Internet is down. And the dog vomited on the floor."

I made an assumption that the latter point was simply a statement of no-longer-current events, and that she was simply informing me of this so that I would be aware of the dog's illness. So I ignored the stinkier matter of concern and asked my wife, "So did you reboot the modem?"

She fumed at me slightly. "Yes, I tried to reboot the modem." After a pause, she said, "OKAY! I'll clean up the vomit, you fix the Internet."

It sounded like a reasonable deal to me. Silly me. I wasn't sure why my wife was mad at me for not volunteering to take on both tasks.

I spent two-and-a-half hours getting bounced between my ISP and... QWEST. In, uh... India. No problem with India, or Indians (I am friends with many), but apparently this particular outsourcing shop is paid by how quickly they hang up on customers. I was volleyed like a tennis ball between both providers, as they used me to point the finger to each other. After a while, I learned that the first thing I needed to say to the "technical support" script-readers from QWEST in India that "I was just sent here from my ISP, please DO NOT TRANSFER ME to them until I've explained this to you!" Otherwise, after getting my information and the "nature of my call," I'd get a perfunctory, "This is a problem with yout Internet Service Provider - I can transfer you there directly. Thank you, call again!"

A long conference call between all three parties resulted in a questionable solution. "Something must be wrong with the modem. We'll send you a new one - you'll get it tomorrow. Thank you, call again."

So I got the new modem on Thursday. Thursday night, I tried to set everything up. Same problem. Two more hours were spent on calls to QWEST and my ISP resulted in very little progress, and I was told that the high-level tech people who could help me would not be in until the morning.

By this time, spending time with tech support started involving ten to fifteen minutes for the tech support person to read through the very long list of notes left on my support ticket, followed by fifteen minutes of repeating the exact same troubleshooting procedures I'd been through approximately sixty times earlier over the last two days.

So Friday, I ended taking the day off work. I guess if I had the flu, it would have been a worse day off. But otherwise, it sucked. Six more hours, taking my modem OUTSIDE to hook up to the exterior phone access, a zillion more experiments and and a visit to a friend (who also had DSL) to test both modems proved that:

* the modems weren't at fault
* my house wiring wasn't at fault, and ....
* woops, sorry, it's Friday evening, everybody's going home, call us tomorrow.

Tomorrow being Saturday (now today), several calls to tech support revealed that the problem was PROBABLY some obscure weird thing at my ISP. Unfortunately, nobody on the Saturday crew has high-level access to be able to fix the system.

So I have to wait until Monday (or until one of the chief tech people decide to answer the page and cancel their weekend plans to rush to work to fix some problem for an obscure, complaining user. And THEN find out whether or not the fix actually works.

I won't begin to list the number of high-priority issues that have occured this week for which we needed Internet access. Murphy's law was in full force. Maybe this wasn't the worst week possible to lose access, but it's close. My frustration level is through the roof.

And yeah, I'm typing this from a friend's house tonight.

Next time, I want to clean up the dog vomit!

Labels: Geek Life

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:11 PM (Permalink)