I waited too long on internet outages
Let me start by apologizing. I’ve kept a shameful secret from you for the past year or so.
Despite my big shot posing as some kind of computer expert, my own computer system at home has been a wreck for the past year. My connection to the internet was lasting about as long as a decent haircut. I tried to fix it myself. I contacted my internet provider (AT&T in this case, but truth is, it could have been any company) for help. And both in my efforts to get help and in my efforts to fix it myself I failed.
If awarded a grade, I’d need to copy what a teacher in the eighth grade told me: “Husted, a big fat zero.”
Coward that I am I have waited this long — now that it’s fixed — to tell you about it. Let me go through what happened, why it happened and how it eventually got right again. Maybe you will learn something from my numerous failures.
Failure No. 1
I kept thinking it would somehow fix itself. So I didn’t pay all that much attention to it, or worry about it. My internet connection would fail and I’d reboot the modem and it would come back. So instead of accepting the fact that a connection shouldn’t fail a couple of times a day, I put it out of my mind. The failure here is ignoring an obvious problem because it seems like too much of a hassle to fix it.
Failure No. 2
I kept trying to fix the thing myself even when it became apparent that I either didn’t have the skill to fix it or that the problem was on the internet provider’s end of things — beyond the reach of my fixing. I searched the web for various fixes, tried them and they either didn’t work or made things worse. The failure here is that I did the same things over and over again hoping for magic instead of moving on and getting professional help.
Failure No. 3
When I finally did con- tact my internet provider, a technician — nice enough guy — came out. He tinkered away — checking signals here, rewiring an outside box there. He seemed competent enough. He assured me that things would now be right. But the days after his visit proved I was still in the same mess, the connection dropped about as often. So I called AT&T again. I went through all the voice menus to reach a human and tried to explain that I still had problems. So another tech came out.
To save endless narrative, just know I repeated that step many times over the coming months. I won’t try to guess how many; but more than two or three times. I ended up getting tired of the process and also decided that somehow I could just live with the endless rebooting. My failure here is that I gave up instead of moving forward.
Failure No. 4
I didn’t follow my own advice. I’ve told you many times that sometimes it is necessary to move higher up the chain when the technical support you get doesn’t fix the problem. For months I just lived with the prob- TECHNOBUDDY’S BIG Q&A lem and did nothing. Finally — and now I get to report one of the rare successes I can claim — I did some online research and found a way to reach a part of AT&T dedicated to personal assistance, unlike the robotic voices of the regular tech support lines. In this case, with AT&T Uverse it was an online AT&T forum where customers can exchange information. But I found a posting explain- ing you could also use that forum to send private email directly to AT&T. And that’s what I did. (The forum, by the way, is located at https://forums. att.com/).
So you understand, the people I contacted didn’t know I write about technology. I didn’t get special treatment because of that. But I sure did get special treatment. Soon two technicians showed up at my door — and my new contacts at AT&T assured me that they would follow up to make sure that the help provided solved the problem.
They did just that, keeping in regular touch with me. Imagine that, instead of me contacting them, they contacted me. It did solve the problem. All this is something I could have done months ago had I followed my own advice and, heck, just plain old common sense.
Learn from my multiple mistakes. That way you won’t hear the echo of my eighth-grade math teacher, Stanley Stanford, saying in a bullfrog voice: “Husted, a big fat zero.”