trailingedge.com down 2964

Tell me about it. If I call my ISP, no matter what the problem is, the first thing the droid asks me is "What version of Windows are you running?" Since my network consists of machines running varous flavours of Windows, Linux, SCO UNIX, and AmigaOS, behind a firewall running OpenBSD, I can come up with some interesting answers. On my last trouble call, however, my answer was "none" - because I had disconnected my ADSL modem from everything except the phone line - and isolated the phone line at the demarcation block - and still saw the "link" light go out every 27 seconds. I finally managed to get them to send a tech out; he ran some tests at the top of the pole and said, "Yep, there's definitely something wrong here." And the problem finally got fixed.

But you sure have to hammer away at them sometimes. If all else fails, I start hitting them with a rapid-fire listing of DNS addresses, POP server names, and all the technical terminology that I can muster. Eventually they get the hint that they're talking to a geek who actually knows a thing or two - and then I can make some progress. Maybe.

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