No One Messes With Our Temporary Mom!
In 2010, I am renting a house with a bunch of other guys in their twenties. Our landlord lives in the guest house in the backyard garage, and she also keeps the wireless router there.
One day, our Internet goes out. My fellow tenants and I are pretty good with the tech stuff, and we diagnose that the problem is beyond our own network. Something is preventing a signal from reaching our house from the utility line, and after waiting two days hoping the problem will fix itself, we have to call [Internet Provider] customer support to send a guy out and fix it.
He arrives five days later. Our landlord is a very friendly Filipino lady in her early sixties, a loving mother, and the kindest soul on the block. She’s everything an opportunistic commission-driven technician loves. But unfortunately for him, she isn’t a dumba**.
The tech is in the middle of explaining what our problem is and comes up with this harebrained story about how we aren’t getting a signal because our Ethernet cable connecting the router to the modem is “kinked”, causing data to “back up like water in a garden hose”.
Let’s pause and reiterate. A major Internet provider’s technician told us that data was backing up in our Ethernet cable because it was coiled, and backing up… “like water in a garden hose”.
He then gives his whole spiel about how the problem could be fixed by buying one of their new $120 routers and spending an extra fifteen dollars on buying an [Internet Provider]-approved Ethernet cable. The idiot takes the bait, and our landlord springs the trap. She calls the other tenants and me to come to the guest house.
The look on the technician’s face is golden. Upon being surrounded by a bunch of twenty-somethings, many of whom work in software and medical tech, we can see his soul trying to jettison out of his butt in a frantic escape. We all walk in with laptops and net diagnostics open, and we plug the laptop straight into the modem to show there’s no down signal. We access the modem properties and confirm that the modem log shows an external outage starting one week ago.
The technician tries to explain that he’ll simply send a call out to see if they can confirm connectivity or something, but our landlord interrupts him to say that he gave her a completely different explanation. She tries to force him to give us the pitch he gave her, but after he refuses and backtracks, she then tells us every single detail.
Coiled cable. Data backing up. Water in a g**d*** garden hose.
After we share a good derisive laugh at this guy, he disappears outside for about ten minutes to make a phone call. He comes back.
Technician: “All right, they’re looking at it. Give us a call if—”
Nope. We held his a** hostage. We bombarded the technician with questions, demanded explanations, and asked him things about the router and the Ethernet cable he was trying to sell that made it somehow better than the ones we already had. All the while, we were really just holding him down while constantly refreshing our connection. We were deprived of the Internet for a week; we had frustrations to vent.
Fortunately for the technician, he was only apprehended by our questioning for a short while. Before we could get any sort of justifiable reasoning for trying to swindle our dear, sweet landlord, the Internet miraculously fired back to life after just ten minutes.
It didn’t matter, though. After that ordeal, we dumped [Internet Provider] forever. Because of that technician, they didn’t just lose that household, but every household my housemates and I moved out to later in life.