Return of the Router From Hell

It’s baaaaaaaaaack!

I hate tech support. Really, I do. Idiots reading from scripts and a total refusal to address the real problem. I spent over three hours on the phone, four calls, to AT&T tech support, at one point getting into a shouting match with a surly phone rep (I refuse to call someone a tech if they’re only reading from a script).

“Sir, I’m telling you, you must be typing the password in all caps.”

“And I’m telling you I’m not, and you’re a frigging idiot. Goodbye.”

(“Must be” in the sense of that was what she was certain I was doing, not what I had to do to get it to work.)

So anyway, I finally got one system online, caught Master Plan online and then gave him a shout on the cell phone. Fifteen minutes and a few simple tests later, we’d determined that it was the router.

In fairness to the last phone rep tech I talked to, she at least worked with me enough to determine it was possibly the router and not their systems — and also, there was some random behavior going on; by the end of the night I had more clues to work with. The router might let a wireless connection go through (from laptop yes, from Soupbone, my oldest system, no); a wired connection (Lyar, Misaki) had no chance and would even screw up the first few attempts after reconnecting the modem directly to Lyar. (Stratos 4 is currently sidelined, or I’d have tried it for a 3rd wireless). The last rep did some research and determined that the error message I was receiving was due to XP SP2 getting confused by the router and generating modem errors; it was a known issue. And she was certain it was a router issue (although I was still unconvinced by that point, I was willing to consider it — she was right, it seems, so I’ll call her a tech.)

AT&T, with it’s “we’re not going to address router issues” and brain-dead tech support, had me changing my password FOUR times (despite the fact that I told them I was able to authenticate and get an IP address from their login server), when all we needed to do was ping across my network and to their servers to figure it out. Granted, the random failures were confusing the issue, but there was enough consistency that if AT&T would be less router-phobic, I’d have wasted far less of their time and mine. And gotten to bed earlier.

Grumble. Oh well, tonight I try resetting the router; if it doesn’t behave, it’s back to Fry’s I go.