Kalimat al-Mutafalsif

Also a waste of time. My internet's been down all day, which means no coding from home, no email, no nothing. I work during the summers mostly from home, and every day without Internet has a direct impact on my quality of life during the school year. Anyways, I just got off the phone with a comcast "technician" trying to fix this minor inconvenience of not being able to make money. This is to the best of my recollection how it went, I was trying to type and talk on the phone at the same time, AND dealing with power flickering.

====================================
Conversation with Comcast Tech support - 7/10/2007
====================================
Participants:
J - Me
T - "Tech" guy
====================================
[For various reasons no method of finding my account worked... until here.]
J - I can give you the router serial and MAC address, I know you guys track those.
T - No, that won't work.
J - Really?
T - Actually *brightens* yea! Is there a CMAC?
J - Nope, just the MAC. But that's unique also.
T - Hmm... we need the CMAC. There should be two types, the MAC and the CMAC, what's the CMAC?
J - Sorry sir, there's just one MAC.
T - Ok, hold on.
[Waits for 2 minutes.]
T - So, you say the MAC is on there?
J - Yes sir [reads MAC].
T - Ah, there we go.
[I explain the problem, now that he has the account (DHCP isn't getting through) He gets me to unplug the router and plug my desktop in directly.].
J - Ok, I'm getting a bad IP here, it's 169.254.44.5.
T - Nope, looks good.
J - Sir, I think that's a restricted IP.
T - Hmm?
J - Its reserved for local networks.
[45 second pause, talking in the background]
T - Oh, yea that's a bad IP.
J - Its normally caused by the device not authenticating properly, perhaps you should authorize this MAC?
T - I don't know about that.
[Pause]
T - What software are you using?
J - What do you mean?
T - You using xp?
J - No I have Linux.
T - Hold on a moment please.
[Hold]
T - Alright, and what is Linux?
J - An Operating System.
T - And what is that? L-E-N----
J - L-I-N-U-X.
T - I never heard of that... Hold please.
[Hold]
T - Alright, we don't support Linux.
J - I know you don't, but could you fix my modem please?
T - Sorry, we don't support Linux.
J - I realize that, but we have 6 computers behind this one router, they have Linux, Windows 2000, and Windows XP. Its the modem that's not working, not the router or my computer.
T - Sorry, we don't support routers.
J - This computer can be Windows XP as well. Would you like me to switch to it?
T - Huh?
J - Shall I switch to Windows XP so we can continue this conversation and you don't just hang up?
T - I thought you were on Linux.
J - I can also boot Windows XP.
T - How's that work? You can just boot any Operating System?
J - Something like that.
T - Ok, sure, load Windows.
[2 minutes to boot Windows, have it freeze, and probably get 100 viruses as I haven't updated my firewall in at least a month.]
[Thankfully during this time my service comes back up. I know because the modem finally starts receiving packets.]
J - Ok, it looks like I'm finally getting a good IP *reads IP*.
T - Yup, that looks good.
[Computer hangs so I'm unable to verify. Few minutes go by while I reboot.]
T - I'm sorry sir, can you get online yet? Tell you what, how about you get online, then call us back if you can't. *In a voice like I'm wasting his time*.
J - Ok sir, have a good evening.
[Epilogue: The Internet came up for a few minutes, even worked with the router in for a bit. Service went out after 5 minutes and was spotty all night. But hey, far be it from me, a customer, to tell them their service is bad.]

About the only reason I stayed so nice and didn't ask for a manager or threaten to bill them for my time lost was the guy was very pleasant at the beginning. Clearly the service industry is right for him, just how about not in a tech support role?