Saturday, April 4, 2009

Spring Cleaning

It all started when I was without internet for the fourth day running.

After spending two hours on the phone with AT&T only to have them tell me the problem was in my router, after climbing over and under and around all the piles of stuff in the back room to try to find all the cords, outlets, plugs, jacks, wires and equipment, I called the router company who wouldn't do any technical support because my warranty is past, would I like to buy another 6-month warranty for $40? Otherwise, technical support would be $30. WTF?

Instead of traveling to whatever country my calls were routed to only to go postal in a very American way, I attacked the monumental mess in my back room with a vengeance.

With superhuman strength born from the special annoyance I feel when dealing with bureaucrats of any stripe, I cleaned, moved furniture, organized, purged, untangled cords. I even repaired a broken chair leg and hung curtains!

But now it looks so great! Thank you, AT&T and Linksys! Without your incompetence, I may have still been stuck with a messy back room.

And now that the cords and equipment are all untangled and sorted, I can see that the problem is that there is no DSL signal coming into my house. Either a bad modem or something wrong "out there." But not my now-unwarrantied (is that a word?) router.

So back on the phone to AT&T; if all doesn't go well, what will I clean next?

3 comments:

Ernie Branscomb said...

I wish that I could count the times that I have experienced problems so numerous that I have called the factory over some kind of a refrigeration problem, only to hear them say, "Hmmm... We’ve never heard of that before“. When I know full well that they must have, because three of four refrigerators that I have looked at are having the problem.

steviewren said...

Spring cleaning-yes! Come on over!

Trixie Belden-double triple YES!

Indie said...

Ernie, irritating, isn't it? One of my technical genius friends came over last night and tracked down the problem. It was that I got a new house phone and plugged it in in the living room without a DSL filter on it. The old phone hadn't had one, but it had been broken for awhile so we'd rarely used the house phone. I should have put it together: I buy a new house phone and the internet goes out.

Steviewren, it sure does feel good to have a clean house! It's inspiring to the creativity. I have to quell the temptation to drag out a huge project and make a big mess all over the nice kitchen table.

Trixie rules!