Max vs. Telstra
The other day I lost my internet connection. All the lights on
my cable modem turned off except one, the Receive light,
and it just blinked at me. I wasn’t worried because this has
happened before and each time it turned out to be a
general fault in my area: koalas chewing through the cables,
for example. Well, actually I’m just guessing there. It could have been
koalas. I never bothered to get into the specifics.
I called up Telstra, my ISP, and after wading through layers of “Press 2 if you want to express your frustration with automated telephony systems,” I got a recorded message saying there was a nationwide problem. I was invited to press 0 to speak to a human about it, and since I wanted to know when it would be fixed, I took them up on this.
Now, I knew this wouldn’t be easy as it sounded. Telstra has an excellent “Network Status” web page that displays problems with its service; if you visit this, you can see if there’s an area-wide outage at a glance. But if you can’t visit this page—if, for example, you’re suffering from the effects of an area-wide outage—you have to call them up, and they refuse to tell you anything until you have exhaustively checked your own computer. Their attitude seems to be that while they accept it’s possible that there are koalas chewing on their cables, it’s much more likely that koalas are chewing on your cables. Or have crawled inside your computer. Or, I suppose, the problem is the result of some more technical issue unrelated to koalas. Anyway, at first I used to have conversations like this:
Max: “My modem’s doing that blinking thing that means there’s a problem with your network, can you tell me when it’ll be fixed?”
Tech: “First I need to confirm everything’s working at your end. Can you tell me what error message you get when you try to connect?”
Max: “No, because I don’t use Telstra’s connection software. It kept crashing so I use the open source replacement. But that’s not the problem; the problem is the modem doesn’t seem to be getting a signal.”
Tech: “Uhh… okay. Can you check that the cable connecting your modem to your computer is plugged in?”
Max: “Well, I could, but whether it is or not, my modem’s still not getting a signal.”
Tech: “Can you check that cable?”
Max: “Hang on… I have to crawl under my desk… ow! What the… so that’s where my favorite pen got to. Okay, yes, the cable is plugged in.”
Tech: “Can you check the cable from the modem is plugged securely into the wall?”
Max: “Fffffff…fine. I just have to move some furniture… urrrrrrghhhh! Arrrrrgh! Okay. Yes it is.”
Tech: “Okay.” (keyboard sounds) “There’s an outage in your area. It should be fixed by two o’clock. Is there anything else I can help you with?”
Then I got smart. This time, when Andrea the tech support person came on the line, I shamelessly lied. “I already checked my cables before I rang, and they’re all plugged in.”
