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.

I’ve worked in an ISP call center before, and even though I was in billing, I heard horror stories from the techs when we spent time complaining on our smoke breaks. As a result (and I’m fairly technically inclined to begin with), every time I have any sort of connectivity issue, I write down a detailed log of every single troubleshooting step I take BEFORE even calling. I also know that the only thing worse than a neophyte is someone who “thinks” that they know about any of this stuff.

Right now, I’m unfortunately stuck with the half of a broadband duopoly that is slightly less awful than the only other one that can provide service.

My last two times dealing with their support staff were less than helpful.

The first time, I start reading off my list of things that I’ve already attempted, and the tech minion interrupts me with:

Tech Support #1: “Go to [blah blah blah] [Windows system setting].”

Me: “The only computers connected here run Linux.”

Tech Support #1: “You have to go to [Windows setting].”

Me: “That’s impossible. There are no Windows machines here, and the traceroute I ran shows the connection dropping somewhere outside the local network.”

Tech Support #1: “Go into [Windows setting]…”

Me: *Lying* “Yeah, yeah.”

I pretend that I do everything they ask, and only then does it get escalated to someone competent who actually admits that there’s an outage.

The most recent time, I’m interrupted once again when going through the list of things that I have already done.

Tech Support #2: “Do you have another cable that you can use?”

Me: “I already checked to make sure both ends are plugged in; I’ve knocked out cables before.”

Tech Support #2: “You really need to try it with a different cable.”

Me: “Look, I know that you need to make sure that the thing is plugged in. I checked both ends, and I do have a cable tester. It’s a known-good part.”

Tech Support #2: “We can’t proceed until you use a different cable.”

Me: *Lying again* “There, new cable. Still nothing.”

They continued to interrupt when I went off the list of things that I had already done. My pings stopped at the router, a fact that they seemed to ignore, even after a factory reset that wiped all of my settings. After half an hour, they finally sent someone to replace the piece of crap that I was forced to rent because their service is designed to only work with their crap.

What I wouldn’t give for actual choice in terms of connectivity, where maybe I could deal with people more capable than an Eliza bot.

Back during the aftermath of Hurricane Michael, I was working for one of the major Internet service providers in the USA. I worked in the fiber business division, but the queues were so overloaded that we ended up getting overflow from residential customers. We had no ability to access their accounts or dispatch for them, and even if we did, resources were at their max, so we just had to talk them down and get them off the phones. Day in, day out, I’d be getting calls like this.

Me: “Thank you for calling—”

Customer: “You f***ers need to get out here and fix my f****** Internet now!“

Me: “Sir, you’re currently speaking to the business division on overflow. I can’t pull your account, but I can see by your phone number that you’re calling from Florida. Repair efforts are underway, but currently, we can’t guarantee when services will be resto—”

Customer: “Don’t give me that bulls***! That’s the same thing the f****** power company said to me five minutes ago!”

Me: “Sir, are you saying you currently don’t have power?”

Customer: “F****** right, I don’t!”

Me: “Sir, even if I could get a tech dispatched out to your location, you do realize that both our modem and your computer require power to operate, correct?”

Customer: “…F*** you!” *Click*

A customer calls in because they can’t connect to the Internet with their dial-up connection. At some point during the walk-through, they manage to delete their shortcut for the dial-up connection. Instead of taking them directly into networking, I decide it will be easier to just have them go into the Recycling Bin and restore it.

Me: “Okay, double-click on the Recycling Bin.”

Caller: “Okay, done, now what?”

Me: “Right-click on your dial-up connection, [Connection], and click ‘Restore’. Let me know when you’re done.”

Five minutes pass, and I’m sitting there in my cubicle just waiting. I hear this rustling and squeaking in the background.

Me: “Did you click ‘Restore’?”

Caller: “What? Oh… Yeah, well, you said recycling bin, and it reminded me that I needed to empty the trash in my bathroom, and now I realized my bathroom floor is a mess! I’m mopping. Can you hang on?” 

Me: “…”

I work for an Internet service provider. A job shows up on my laptop in the morning, and it turns out a tech has been to the customer’s home before but wasn’t able to resolve the issue because the owner wasn’t home. I arrive at the customer’s home and she is there. After I introduce myself:

Me: “I just need to take a measurement at the side of the home to verify that the problem is in the house.”

I am basically double-checking that the other tech did his job correctly.

She flips her s***!

Customer: “No! The problem is in the house!”

Me: “Well, it will only take me a few seconds to verify.”

Customer: “Either you come inside immediately or I’m going to call your manager and give you s***!”

Me: “Okay, the problem is in the house. Have you unplugged all your phones?”

There was a short circuit, and it’s usually a phone or modem plugged in causing this.

Customer: “Of course, I did!”

She is rolling her eyes as if I’m an idiot.

Me: “Do you have a modem, and is it unplugged?”

Customer: *Kind of taken aback for a second* “I didn’t unplug my modem.”

Me: “Unplug it, please?”

I watch on my multimeter as the short circuit disappears. I tell her that was the problem. Still not believing me, she says:

Customer: “Hold on a minute. I’m going to verify with my phone.”

Sure enough, it’s working.

Customer: “Huh, you don’t know how lucky you are, because I was just going to yell at you.”

I smugly told her to have a nice day, went outside to my van, and charged her for every single thing I could possibly find related to the service call. I hope she enjoyed her bill.