Executive Summary: So very angry, more (un)interesting battles against utilities, and my own computer.

So I come home from work Thursday to find my internet out. I reboot the modem but it never gets past the opening handshake as indicated by the modem itself, which is “good” in my eyes since it’s not just my computer being stupid (which it has been before). So I phone up rogers help line, and get an automated assistant who tried to guess at my problem by recognizing a phrase, rather than asking individual questions.

I try the direct approach a customer might if they hadn’t had to deal with one of these souless minions of orthodoxy before, I say “My Internet is out. My Cable TV is out”, and it immediately directs me to sales, since obviously I am in need of internet and TV. Hang up, dial again. Main Menu. Then I try the direct approach, I say “Technical Support”, that at least gets me where I want to go. Then it asks what kind of thing I need help with, Cable TV, Internet, Phone, whatnot. This is very odd to me since they have separate numbers to phone (I chose the TV since it was the most obvious), but they just seem to go to the same system.

Anyway, I get a guy who tells me that there is an outage in my area, and not to worry, it’s being worked on. “Oh, okay, thanks”, I figure, it’s being worked on, I’m exausted, I can wait until tomorrow because, I’m sure, By Then Everything Will Be Fixed. The support guy must have been laughing after he hung up.

Friday, no change, angry, I phone again, asking for an estimate on the outage. “Outage? No, there hasn’t been an outage in your area… it seems just to be your unit. I’ll send a guy out, how about Saturday 2-5?” Oh good, I get to hang around waiting for someone, fine, okay. So they lied to me about the outage, that’s a strike. And my service went down at all, that’s a strike, perhaps, wait and see…

So the next day the guy comes, at like 11 or so. Lucky I was up and cleaning already (but I think the guy phoned just to get it over with, he was just in the area and thought he could take care of it faster if I was willing, so I do appreciate that). He didn’t bother with coming up (which is good cause my efforts at cleaning were ineffective) but he did phone me several times asking me to watch my TV so he could tell which line was mine.

Why should he have to do that, surely the line was marked, right? Wrong. He told me the problem was that when my line was installed, it wasn’t marked, so someone (likely a Rogers Employee I’m figuring) saw it, figured it was old, and ripped it out. So they botched my installation, Strike 2, and they ripped it out because of it causing me this problem to start with. Strike 3… maybe that shouldn’t count as a strike because it’s really because of 2, but still, they just raised their prices for no good reason, so they can take the other strike.

The guy phoned up once the TV was working and said he was going to check the levels for the modem (from his truck), and if it needed to be adjusted, he’d phone to get into the building. So I left my computer alone for a while… I figured 20 minutes was enough, and with no word, I tried to use the net.

Nothing would work, everything instantly failed with no connection errors. So I figured, a reboot would probably do everyone some good. So I did. And the damn Rogers/Yahoo self healing program I let it install when I first got the connection said, very helpfully I must add, I had no connection. Spiffy. It recommended rebooting the router, and then the computer. Fine, I’ll play it’s little game. I did both, rebooted, and it came up again. This time offering to release and renew the IP address. I had tried that with ipconfig earlier to no avail, but go ahead….. timing….. out…… And the the self-help thing just cycled itself and started over with suggesting rebooting the router and then the computer. Go to hell Self-Healing thingy.

Figuring the cable guy was long gone and everything was fine from their end, I phone the High-Speed Internet helpline which got me to the same place as all the others, and got a human and told him my sob story. So he looked at the modem remotely… everything was fine, levels are good, connection is great (his words). But…. no computer on the other side… no IP address (Yep, I know).

So he has me go into my XP Network Settings and right click on my LAN connection object and go to the properties. Now… I must admit, as geeky as I may seem, if there is an area of computing I know incredibly little about, Networking is definitely one of them. I never really learned anything about the archane methods and tools available to me. Sure, in theory I know stuff, but how can I map these stupid XP icons to that theory? Anyway, he was expecting my LAN object to have details about the kinds of connections it supports. Nope, and then he got very confused, which confused me. So then I mentioned I have this thing called Network Bridge. Apparently it allowed me to bridge my network connections (uuuughgh, hmm), I never really paid attention to it since up until now, Everything Just Worked. But the tech guy was in shock, he’d never heard of anyone having that in there. He asked if I could uninstall it. Now, I’m a little wary of uninstalling components of my computer at the behest of someone over the phone, call me cautious. But I did see that I could remove connections from the bridge without uninstalling the component itself (since disabling it didn’t really have the effect I wanted). Anyway, as soon as I did that, everything started waking up, like MSN and ICQ.

Well joy, to get back to where I was on Wednesday, I had to change my settings because my cable was physically disconnected. What? No, I don’t understand either. I’ve looked up stuff on the bridge, and as I far as I can tell, it was just bridging my Firewire (connected to nothing) and my LAN (connected directly to the modem), so I don’t see why this suddenly decided to botch. He asked me how that was configured like that, and I said it was like that the whole time, but I bet it was as a result of running the Windows Internet Connection Helper Wizard Thingy many many times over the course of being at the university where my computer was exposed to many irritating LAN setups. Since this used to work with Rogers, and not now, I’m giving them a half strike for that as well.

I’m giving myself another half strike for yet again knowing nothing about Networking with my own damn computer. Perhaps one day I’ll learn.