Internet Repair

[AlleyCat]

a Customer called to say his internet is not working.

His modem is online, he can ping and telnet, so no firewall issue.

Turned out, his homepage is an old Hewlett-Packard page, that no long exists. For the last 26 minutes, he has been online.

[tropicsgoddess]

Wow...just...wow. Here's one on me.

[lordlundar]

Here's one for you.

I got a call from a relative I was doing freelance work for. She tells me that her email isn't downloading the messages and she's getting an error that it can't connect. Okay, I tell her to load up her browser and tell me what comes up and after how long. (instant response, delayed response, error message, page loading, etc) so I can find out if she's even getting a signal. All I get was that the email client was taking a bit of time before popping up the error message.

*sigh* Email clients try several times before giving up. As such, that tells me nothing!

Change of tactic: I get her to tell me what lights are on with the modem. Okay, results say she's connecting, but not getting a signal. Curious. Let's try tactic one again. I ask her to load the browser, Internet Explorer, etc., trying to get her to simply do as I ask. No dice. She thinks that the email client can give me the info I need, so won't do it. I surrender at this point (a half hour later) and say I'll be over.

A half hour later, I get there and head to the machine. First thing I do is load up the browser and guess what greets me? A notice from the ISP that the connection is severed. See, she was moving her computer and modem to another location in the house (home business) and disconnected her modem before she moved anything. After a while of not getting the pings responding, the ISP freezes the connection, requiring you to log in to reestablish the connection. So, I let her know that she has to phone her ISP to reestablish the connection and retrieve her info to quickly resolve this in future.

So, an hour long tech call that would have been 10 minutes tops if she just did that I ask.