Shaun Lewis: the Man, the Myth, the Legend

Well, today was supposed to be the glorious day my household finally stepped into the 21st Century; in other words, we were getting high-speed Internet today. Unfortunately, I have experienced little joy over the arrival of broadband. In fact, I have spent the last half of a day trying to get it to work.

The Story

The Time-Warner Cable guy came to our house @ about noon (EST, of course). He set everything up very quickly, offered a minimal explanation of what to do, and left without checking anything. I waited, as he said I should, for the modem to kick in, but that simply did not happen. After an hour of Internet Explorer errors, I called Time-Warner’s tech support and waited on hold for 20 minutes. I got bored with that and called the 800 number; I was instantly connected (”instantly” meaning I had to go through a labyrinth of automated menus that did not apply to me) to the rudest person I have ever talked to. She embodied the words “embittered employee.” After being grilled by Fraulein Time-Warner Nazi, I was transferred to a technical specialist who was certainly not a specialist and knew little about anything technical. After troubleshooting the problem with him, he decided the modem was bad and I should get another one.

So, I drove the 15 minutes to the Time-Warner place, waited in line, picked up a modem and drove 15 more minutes back home. I hooked up the new modem and had precisely the same trouble I had before. So, I called Time-Warner’s technical support people yet again. This time, while I was on hold, I decided to try to hook up the connection to the back of the other computer we have to see if it would work—it did. So, I knew it wasn’t the modem. When I finally talked to the new tech support person (who this time happened to be the polar opposite of Fraulein), he decided he didn’t know what the problem was. He was going to transfer me to a “Level 3 Technician” and he did just that by putting me on hold again. By this time, it was 5 o’ clock in the evening. I was slightly bored by all the phone waiting I had done, so I decided to lay down on my bed instead of staring at the blank computer screen. I sat there on my bed for 25 minutes waiting for a representative. At about 5:30 (still EST, of course) I fell asleep. It wasn’t until an hour later that I woke up to a busy signal from the phone that had been off the hook for quite a while now.

Realizing I had just wasted all the time I spent waiting on hold because I was now at the end of the hold line, I decided not to call back tech support. I decreed that I would fix the problem myself. Normally, I’m pretty good at fixing computers, but today was definitely what I would call an off-day. By the time midnight rolled around, I had uninstalled a lot of programs off the computer, taken apart two computers, rebuilt two computers twice, purchased a new network card, installed the network card, wasted $16 on a new network card, and finally (it really was the icing on the cake), had a catastrophic system failure that caused the computer to boot up to a black screen with no prompt. Oh, and I had somehow managed to disconnect the hard drive and CD-ROM drive profiles on the computer I’m using now so the hard drive thought it was a CD-ROM and the CD-ROM thought it was a hard drive.

Truly, it was an immense achievement in the history of man.

Now, as I write, I have resigned my soul to failure. One computer is working well again (ironically, it’s the older and slower one), while the other computer is totally, and I don’t put this mildly, all shot to hell. In fact, I can’t even use a start-up disk to get back to the DOS prompt because the only thing the floppy drive is good for now is giving I/O (Input/Output) errors.

So, that has been my day. Next time, I think I’ll just run over my computer with a car and save a couple hours. Still, I had a lot of fun and dreamed about placing myself up in a bell tower and picking people off one-by-one with a high-powered rifle.

It was certainly one of those days…