Chaos Attraction

"Have You Unplugged and Replugged Yet?"

2010-09-18, 10:19 a.m.

So for no good reason, my modem stopped working Friday night. GREAT TIMING THERE.

Yes, this is gonna be a full on whine post. Deal with it!

As far as I can tell, it's the same problem that it always is, which is: about every other year or so, the darn thing stops working, and no matter what I do I can't fix it, which forces me to call Indian tech support, and they do some kind of weird reboot on their end and it works again. In my case I had to wait until Saturday to go to a building on campus with Internet so I could find the various phone numbers to call and attempt to put in an online bug fix (which didn't work and REALLY forced me to have to call).

But the thing is that the first, last, and really, only thing that my DSL company will tell you to do when such a thing occurs is, "Have you unplugged and replugged it? All of it? The power cord, the modem cords, your laptop? Did you leave it unplugged FOR A FEW MINUTES before you replugged it?"

Yes, I know people are morons. Yes, I know I am a moron for having to call tech support at all myself. But jeebus h. christ, I UNPLUGGED AND REPLUGGED EVERYTHING ABOUT FIFTEEN TIMES BEFORE I CALLED YOUR ASSES. I did every damn thing I possibly could do alone before I gave up and called (so, over 24 hours before I bit that bullet). So I find it really, really annoying that while I wait on hold, instead of playing elevator music, the message just kept repeating, "Have you unplugged and replugged yet?" Sometimes I want to kick Microsoft for introducing that concept to the entire world, even for non-M$ products.

Anyway, the phone call took an hour and a half, clearly calling India (though really, I don't know why they have fake American names at this point when they aren't even faking American accents). To the credit of Mr. Anonymous Indian Techie, it took over an hour to get one of my computers online (the other currently isn't, but they don't do routers or Linux, so I'm not surprised), and he didn't lose it on me or try to pass the buck, and it eventually got fixed, so that's good. God knows I'm awful dealing with tech crap on the phone, but I didn't start yelling or crying at any point either, so good for me.

But... yeah. I think I'll put a post about the GOOD parts of the weekend in a separate post so people can avoid the bitchrant if they so desire.


previous entry - next entry
archives - current entry
hosted by DiaryLand.com