TECHNOLOGY
Life Without The Internet
I hate to be a whiner, but I lost my internet connection last week –
and with it, my life.
Why? I can’t tell you how many explanations I’ve heard – from automated voice-response technical support lines and, occasionally, real people. I can only tell you that it’s fixed now. After five days, seven hours on the telephone and four trips to the computer store, we discovered the problem.
Discover is the perfect word to describe the process you go through to restore your internet connection. It is not a simple problem. Simple problems can be solved by a professional who knows what he is doing. But this was a problem of inter-connectivity between computers, modems, software, wireless networks, phone lines and the obvious culprit – me.
And each component has its own telephone support system (except me) so I set about solving it as a pilgrim sets out on a journey down the road, gathering my little band of telephone support friends, each of us pooling our little clusters of knowledge to eliminate branches in the road not worth pursuing.
My first call, naturally, was to SBC, the provider of my internet DSL service. And my first telephone support companion was a computer who led me through a series of voice response prompts that got me to a real person, Alicia, who asked me all the same questions again. The preliminaries out of the way – “May I call you Scott”, “Yes, may I call you Alicia?” – she asked me to describe the problem.
“So I’m running OSX 10.4 on two iBook G4’s through an Airport connected to a Speed Stream 5300 on SBC Global,” I began, like you get extra credit for knowing your model numbers. “But it’s busted. I can’t connect.”
Alicia was amused but not impressed. “Are you getting three steady green lights on the modem?” I told her I was. “I’m pinging your line. It’s not a problem on our end,” she said. Alicia suggested I power everything down and power it all back up, but I still could not connect. “I’m still pinging your line. It must be in the computer or the wireless network. Call Apple,” she suggested.
By the time I reached Apple, it was 5 PM on a Friday night in Chicago. Fortunately, my Apple representative Aimee, was in Vancouver, Canada.
Aimie and I started trouble-shooting my computer searching for remedies. In the process, I found myself emptying a cabinet of computer manuals, passwords, serial numbers and boot-up disks all over my desk. (There’s a reason why you save this crap). We plugged and un-plugged. We powered down and powered up. We updated the firmware in the Airport. We changed the settings in the preference folder. We dumped .plists into the trash. Aimie attempted, in every way the manual allowed her, to burrow into the internet through another connection route.
At one point, during one of our power down/power up routines, Aimie excused herself to get a sweater and I went rummaging in the refrigerator for dinner. It was now going on 7 PM, time to “escalate” the problem to Level 2. That got me connected to Dave, another tech support person one up the ladder from Aimie who works out of the Apple support center in Austin, Texas. I don’t think Dave was having a good day.
Dave had taken about five minutes to read over Aimie’s notes and came on the line like a drill sergeant handling a raw recruit.
“Okay, are you with me?” he asked.
“Go to the Library. Dump the ______ files (I was so intimidated I forget what they are called.) Go to the Network Preferences and change it to TC/PIP. Hardware your modem cable into the Ethernet port,” he said. “Power down and power up . . . Tell me when you’re back up.”
“Do you need to get a sweater or something?”
I asked.
“No, coffee,” he said. When he got back, Dave had a simple question.
“Is it back up? Click on connect,” he said.
I did. Nothing happened.
“It’s the modem,” he said.
“But I called SBC and they say they can ping it,” I said.
“Yeah, but they can’t tell you how it’s working internally. If they could, hackers everywhere could do the same thing and really screw you over. SBC knows it’s there, but they don’t know it’s working.”
“So you’re sure it’s the modem?” I asked. “Don’t you want to try something else? Maybe I’m doing something wrong.”
“Trust me. I’ve done this for 20 years. It’s the modem,” he said. “Get a new one.”
Well, just like that, I felt like my problem was solved. I could go to the computer store Saturday morning, buy a new modem and be back in business – and it wasn’t my fault. Or so Dave told me.
I went to sleep thinking about all the undone things I would have to catch up on Saturday. I had two rush equipment orders I had to confirm; a beta website to comment on; legal agreements to approve; and a half dozen other proposals I’d sent by email and was now anxiously waiting to hear about.
On the more mundane level of my personal life, I had a new appreciation of all the things I’d come to rely on the internet for. I couldn’t Google anything. I couldn’t read Slate or Salon or The Note or watch the videos on Rocketboom. I could not even (gasp!) see the readership stats for The Week Behind. I didn’t have Mapquest. I would have to stand in line to buy movie tickets! I was dead in the water. In Pilgrim’s Progress, you could say I had entered the Slough of Despond.
If I was going to buy a new modem, I wanted to get the right one so I called the 1-800-SBC-STORE. They told me all the compatible modems I could get "at any local computer store.”
My favorite is MicroCenter, just two blocks away, which had a very handsome ZOOMx for Macs and PC’s that seemed to fit the bill. But when I got home, I found it only ran under the older Mac OS 9.6. So back to the store I went. That was their only model. But a technical support person at Micro Center gave me a secret “work around” that only required a call to SBC giving them a model number on the bottom of the box that they could recognize for a connection.
An hour later, with my modem now installed, I called SBC. But they weren’t buying the act. “We don’t support that model,” my latest tech support friend said. “You need a Speed Stream 4100. You can find it at any local computer store.”
I don’t often get snippy on the phone. But I’ve now spent six hours on the phone with no problem resolution.
“Oh yeah, name me one,” I said.
“Radio Shack,” she said.
“Any Radio Shack?” I asked.
“Any Radio Shack,” she said, “or you can buy it online.”
“If I could get online, I wouldn’t need it!” I shouted.
The nearest Radio Shack is only two miles from my house. In Saturday traffic, that translates to 20 minutes. They did not have any Speed Stream 4100 modems. The clerk checked their computer and told me there were, in fact, no Speed Stream 4100 modems available at any other Radio Shack in a 50-mile radius.
At 3 PM on Saturday, after three hours of driving around, I passed a Best Buy and swerved into the parking lot. There was nothing on the modem shelf even resembling the box I needed. But I’d come too far to give up. I asked at the help desk. They told me the person I needed to see was helping another customer. I waited for him to get free. (In Pilgrim’s Progress, this is called "The Pasture of Patience.") He led me to an SBC end-aisle display filled with Speed Stream 4100 SBC/Yahoo connection boxes.
It’s hard to describe my excitement when I got home, plugged in the new modem, loaded the new SBC software (typed in my old connection passwords) and it worked. Eureka! My favorite expression at the end of any Discovery Quest is Eureka. I was connected – for all of about 4 hours.
I checked my email. I had two orders requiring confirmation, an email from my lawyer -- no responses to my proposals -- nine opportunities to buy Viagra, 15 mortgage re-financing offers, three alerts to love buddies in my neighborhood, and 22 ways to buy Rolex watches. Then my connection -- once alive -- went dead again.
Sunday was a quiet day. I read The New York Times, took down the Christmas Tree and resigned myself to the fact that I would never access the internet again. But hope springs eternal (“Our Pilgrim finds resolve and dedicates himself to move ahead.”)
I called SBC again. A new technical support person “pinged” my line and determined that there was a problem in the downstream connection. She wrote up a trouble ticket for the maintenance department. She gave me a reference number (always get a reference number) and promised a repairman would be out to look at it that night.
By Monday morning, I was back up on the internet.
Which only goes to show: A journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single wrong
step. A journey of ten minutes begins with finding the right tech support
person at the get-go.