Modem Toasted

I was off-line for several days, because the modem toasted
itself. 
I didn't do it, honest!  It had been acting up for a couple of
weeks, causing random "web site not found" errors.  If it happened
very much, I'd reboot the thing and it would be better for a while.



Finally, it failed.  The green power light turned to red.  It
would not restart.  Unplugging it, waiting the necessary 20
seconds or so, and plugging it back in did not help.  Until the
third time, when not even the red light would go on.  It was dead.



Called the ISP, who had sold us the thing about a year ago.  They
sent a new one, gratis.  Plugged it in.  Nothing
happened. 
Tried another outlet, etc.  Nothing happened.  Read the
(RTFM) manual, even, with it still plugged in.  Nothing.



Called ISP.  They agreed to send another.  Hung up the phone,
turned
around...the modem lights were on.  It works.  No
problems.  Except I have no faith that the "new" one (actually it
is refurbished) will last for very long. 


i-1a8a4cb529d90eb9096a5cc9009f21af-cat-modem-box.jpg



They told me I had to ship the old dead modem back.  Which got me
to
thinking:



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More like this

Our home Internet has been out since Friday, which is, as you might imagine, somewhat vexing. The most likely cause is that our DSL modem is dying (it's nine years old), which raises a technical problem.
We've been having some problems with our DSL service at Chateau Steelypips again, which has gotten me thinking about the design of devices that are annoying to use. It occurs to me that you might use a sort of control to indicator ratio as a measure of how irritating a device is to use.
After a bit less than a month's wait our new house is finally on-line! The winter of our off-line discontent dissolvèd made glorious broadband summer.

Although I won't comment on your cartoonist skills other than to say they are better than mine...The humor is better than 99 out of 100 cartoons that are printed in the papers I read. Very, very, very funny.

By Mike Olson (not verified) on 22 Jul 2009 #permalink