The support war rages on...

I really dont know how to vent my frustrations with customer sipport properly. I thought one blog entry was enough. And that was only a couple days ago.

So here I am, at home, on a Saturday night..(read: LOSER), and noticing my computer was running slow, I thought I'd actually reboot the thing. Upon reboot, it will not connect to the internet. I notice this first because my firewall shoots me a message, followed by the stupid internet link thing that Half-Life 2 infests your computer with. But I thought..uhh..maybe its some sort of loose cord, or the message is wrong..so I try connecting to Google. ESPN. Nothing. $#%@!

Well, I try rebooting again, to the same results. So, I run a Norton Anti-Virus check, but all it found was some stupid spyware thing, which I, in the immortal words of StrongBad, "DELETED!" So..now we come to the part of my life that warranted this whole blog entry. I call Verizon customer support (my DSL ISP).

"Your wait time is approximately less than 30 minutes." Great. Well, I had some crap to do around the house, so I put the phone on speaker mode and clean up my laundry, do some dishes, put away some paperwork thats been sittin' out..and 30 minutes later..nothing..so I start going through an issue of Cargo magazine I half-read..and then some Money Magazine that I also only read part way through...and..57 minutes later.."Verizon Customer Support, can I get your home telephone number please?"
So we go through the usuals "Is your modem unplugged?" "Have you rebooted?"
Dude. I know theres some 61 year old person living in Chad who has not ever used a computer before, and granted, he doesnt know that Im not that guy, but I am not a complete moron. I may not know much about service packets and going deep inside my registry to edit the keys..but I can tell when I have kicked a cord. So I humor him. We check all the main things. We reboot. Twice. I cannot connect using IE or Netscape. I tried telnetting..wouldnt work. But in DOS, it does ping websites. Odd.
I also notice theres only been 3 lights on my modem...
Normally I have 4 lights on my modem, which he INSISTS cannot all be on at once . "Thats..like..impossible..it would..break the thing" he claims. Well, I was about 95% sure all the lights are on all the time..my computer uses the usb jack, and the laptop uses the ethernet port..but whatever. I humored him again. So, after 35 more minutes (thats 122 minutes!), he said it was beyond him fixing it and suggested I bring the computer back to its manufacturer (haha, I made the computer myself, I'm fucked..great joke). I hung up with the support technician and thought..well, theres a shop just up the road a bit...of course, its almost Sunday, and Monday is a holiday..happy happy joy joy. Plus I knew, it isnt the computer itself..it had to be either the connection or the modem..Then I remembered a client I work with also freelances as a computer fix-it-nerd..and well, I could call him on Tuesday..
I ran Norton Disk Doctor..nothing. I thought, well..I did download some new key generator for WinZip (shhhhh)..and all these windows popped up then from the site and Anti-Virus was killing trojan horses and other viruses faster than Robitussin on a bad day, so I thought, shit, running Spybot couldnt hurt.
It found 37 freakin little cookie/tracker/pests in my computer..which again, I DELETED!
Ok..so I cross my fingers...I type slowly..e-s-p-n-dot-go-com-enter..never was I so glad to see NASCAR prominently displayed.
So there ya have it. Forget customer support. Forget Norton. Forget it all. Spybot, you have a new best friend.