Tech Support conundrum

While I was surfing around today, my DSL connection went dead. Just like that. One second I’m a downloading fool, the next second, nothing.

Often these problems, when they occur, correct themselves after a while, and usually they’re area-wide, but after 90 minutes I decided to brave the SBC voice-jail system and call in the problem.

It turned out there was no problem in Austin, and the problem was just on my connection. I had already done all the obvious restorative tricks, to no avail. After the first operator was unable to bring me back up, she kicked me to L3 support. The guy who worked with me there tried more stuff, and after quite a while, told me that he thought my modem had gone bad: he was able to “sync” with the modem, but it wasn’t carrying any IP. Something about this seemed fishy–if the modem went bad, why would it go bad in such a selective way?–but he seemed to know what he was talking about, so I took him at his word. He suggested I try buying a new modem, plug that in, and if that didn’t help, I should call back with my trouble-ticket number and request a service call. Since I have such an old modem, which requires a set-up at their end that newer modems don’t use [geek-mode=on] Specifically, my old Alcatel 1000 uses a virtual path of 8 and virtual circuit of 35; newer DSL modems use a virtual path of 0 and virtual circuit of 35 [geek-mode=off], he changed things around at the central office to accommodate a newer modem. SBC could sell me a modem, of course, but it would be more expensive.

So I went out in search of a new modem. Comp USA, Best Buy, and Fry’s didn’t have ’em; Best Buy supposedly stocks DSL modems, but had none on hand; the other places don’t even stock them. I plowed home through heavy traffic, frustrated. I called a couple other Best Buys–same story. I decide to take what SBC has to offer and call back on the trouble ticket.

The guy who worked with me earlier had gone home for the day, so I got a different guy. After reading my file, he put me on hold and immediately started trying some stuff. My connection came back up. He explained to me that someone must have “bounced” (taken down and then put back up) my ATM connection, which is apparently a common maintenance task (I didn’t realize they were using ATM), but forgotten about the “putting back up” part.

All this raises the question: what do you do when you’ve got a tech guy who is helpful and seems knowledgeable, but is overlooking an apparently obvious problem? In the past I’ve dealt with unhelpful or un-knowledgeable tech people by just calling back later, and in this case, that’s what worked, but there was no way of knowing that.