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More Internet connection fun; and a solution in sight
Last night I spent 2 1/4 hours on the phone with Covad’s tech support supervisor, trying to get to the bottom of my connection problem (I spent a total of 4 1/2 hours on all my calls with Covad yesterday). He was intelligent, competent, and helpful, and is also an American who speaks American English, so that I didn’t have to keep asking him to repeat what he had said. At one point I was sticking a toothpick into an almost invisibly tiny “reset” hole on my Belkin wireless router (I didn’t have a safety pin readily at hand, which was what he told me I needed, and the tip of a pen was too wide, and then I thought of the toothpick as a substitute), which we weren’t able to access from my computer, and the toothpick method wasn’t working, but then low and behold it did work and we were able to get into the router interface and get rid of certain incorrect changes in the settings which one of the other tech persons I had dealt with earlier in the day had had me make when I spent an hour and a half on the phone with him. Unfortunately, the supervisor, after trying everything, finally determined that there was no fix for my connection problem, and that I need a new DSL modem—the opposite of what the previously mentioned other tech support person had told me, which was that I needed a new router for which I would have to pay Covad $150 or else have a Covad tech person come to my home for $150—neither of which would have helped. Despite the fact that earlier tech support guy, whose name was Muhammad, gave a wrong prognosis, and also had me make an incorrect change in the settings of the wireless router which made the router inaccessible which required the use of the toothpick to reset it, I don’t want to put him down, as he was trying to do a good job. But the language problem, or rather pronunciation problem, was something. Not only did I have to keep asking him to repeat himself, but on a couple of occasions when I still didn’t understand him I had to ask him to spell the word. Once he was telling me to look at the “landbots” on the back of my wireless router. I had no idea was he was saying (“bots? what is a bot?”), and finally asked him to spell the word. It was “ports.” Talk about being separated by a common language.
Nik S. writes: I think it’s funny your tech help was named Muhammad. Lol. Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 02, 2010 02:14 PM | Send Email entry |