JeremyP's Blog

My internet link has been very intermittant recently, a problem I have putr down to the weather. It would suddenly just go off for a few houres and then come back. The link got so unreliable, in fact, that I started going to the office instead of working from home. My theory was that something was malfunctioning in the heat.

Eventually, it went down last Thursday and didn't come back at all on Friday, so at this point, I decided it was time to call NTHell technical support. NTL has brilliant customer service for those people who want to buy something off them, but for everybody else, calling them is rumoured to be a nightmare of mythic proportions. I've never had to call them to fix something, so I stress the last sentence is pure hearsay.

My tactic with tech support people is to be polite and play the game, so I always let them take me through their script even though it's got all sorts of stuff in it that I've already checked - you know, things like "is the modem plugged in", "is the network cable plugged in", "can you ping the router" etc. As I was about to call NTL tech support, I decided I should check all the cable stuff and everything even though there was definitely a hardware fault with NTL's equipment and I didn't want to get in an argument that would make me look stupid if it turned out the network cable wasn't plugged in.

You can imagine my surprise when, on applying pressure to the network cable plug that went into the socket on the PC that acts as a firewall/router, I heard a little click and a green LED next to the socket suddenly came on. The Internet connection has been perfect since. It must be that the weather has cooled down.