Unfiltered Story #328140

I had my and my wife’s home setup all good to go. Modem connected to a router with wireless capability, as well as being a backup drive and printer server. I worked out of state for most of my marriage, so I was gone most of the time. Whenever the internet connection wouldn’t work, my wife would try to fix it. She’d muck about with various settings in the router, and then expect me to help her fix it remotely after totally mucking it up. Each time I’d explain to her that the settings in the router were what they needed to be to connect to the internet, and changing them when the internet connection was lost would NOT help, and that the only thing she should try is to power cycle the modem and then the router, and if that didn’t fix it, the problem was a service interruption and she should call the provider. Every time this happened the problem was a service outage in our area, but the next time it happened she’d still think that somehow the settings in the router had magically become “bad” and she’d fiddle with them. That makes about as much sense as, when your car won’t start this morning after having been running fine last night, you pop the hood, and just start pulling wires and connecting them to random new places in the hope that the car will start working, when the actual problem is a dead battery. After this kind of crap happening numerous times, I finally snapped on one trip home after spending time getting things working again. I yelled, cursed, and was visibly very angry as I explained that if the connection was working yesterday, but wasn’t working today, and a power cycle didn’t fix it, the problem was a service interruption, and she should call our provider, but she was to NEVER, EVER, mess with the router settings again. One of the few times I lost my temper with her, but at least she quit screwing the router settings up.