6 Days w/out the Internet

I just had my wonderful internet connection restored about 2 hours ago and damn did I miss that thing. A whopping 6 full days has passed during this period of no internet at home.

I came back home from SF on Tuesday at almost exactly 4PM. I discovered almost immediately that I had no internet connection at home. I called Shaw, my internet provider, at around 6PM hoping that it was a simple mix-up and that it could be resolved over the phone. 2 hours and 3 phone calls later, my internet connection was still not back on.

The phone technicians repeatedly gave me ridiculously stupid suggestions such as tightening the cable wire, unplugging and then replugging the power cord, checking for splitters, and checking for routers. In fact, I've called Shaw so many times over my life that I've figured out their entire script.

It's always exactly the same four things that I've just described in the previous sentence. It's tightening, unplugging, splitters, and routers. It seems like this is basically all the knowledge that you need to work as a phone tech for them.

And if these fixing internet techniques don't work, you're stuck w/ a cable tech guy who is going to show up at your apt. 2 days later at an extremely inconvenient time.

Most people work b/w 8AM to 6PM, so then why do they always schedule their visits 8AM - 12PM, 12-4PM, and 4-8PM? If you're a single guy in an apt and have any kind of work b/w 8AM to 8PM, it becomes almost impossible to have time to wait for a cable technician to show up.

So w/ my story, after finding out on Tuesday night that I couldn't fix the internet over the phone, I had to wait for an appointment on Thursday afternoon 12-4PM to fix my problem. However, later on Wednesday, I got called into work for Thurs. and I had to reschedule for now Friday morning 8AM-12PM.

By Thursday night, I got called into work again for Friday so I had to reschedule again, this time for Sunday 8AM-12PM.

By Sunday morning, I waited patiently for the cable tech to show up and he didn't. At 12PM, when I called Shaw to reschedule again, they were able to give me another appointment for Sunday, 2-4PM.

At 2:05 PM today, a very nice Shaw tech guy showed up to my apt. and worked on my problem for about 30 minutes. At first he had to test and make sure that I was actually getting signals sent to my modem. There were no problems at all and then he tested my modem to make sure there wasn't nothing wrong w/ my modem.

Well, it turns that there were something going on w/ my modem. After phoning in to his Shaw telephone help, it was determined that the serial number on my modem was misrepresented in their computer, which meant that my modem couldn't actually receive the signal coming in. It's much more simple to explain than that really. The modem's serial number needs to be read by the main Shaw computer in order for the internet to work. And for some reason, my file got erased which disabled my modem connection.

I couldn't believe that it took 5 days for somebody to figure out that my serial number was wrong. It would definitely be one of my first questions for fixing the cable modem over the phone. "Hey, can you please read me your serial number?, " would be a very easy question to ask. It's certainly more valuable than their preferred 4 questions that never helps me resolve my problem.