dispatches from quilt city

This story is true

Last year, my parents were having about their sixteenth thousand problem with their router. They'd had a cheap MSN Router that they'd always had problems with so I made them buy a Netgear router. If I recall, I spent almost an hour trying to set it up but it seemed to work fine for several months.

Then, when I came home this weekend it was down after a power outage. I immediately called Netgear because I couldn't pull up anything with the IP address listed on the router. I was informed by the customer service representative that the warranty for hardware failure on December 15, 2006. Only thing it WAS December 15. When I tried to explain this, I was informed that it was a -1 warranty and they could answer no other questions. Grrrrr....

SO we sent Ron to Best Buy to buy a Linksys Router, which one of our relatives had suggested. He came back with a box touting "One Step Setup." Needless to say, I was not hopeful. Two hours later, my cynicism proved accurate. After trying ourselves for a while, a representative informed us we had to install a firmware update to get it to work. Information that would have been helpful IN THE BEGINNING OF THE PROCESS.

We finally got it working for Ron's computer and his laptop. However, when I told the representative that I couldn't get the internet on my mac, she informed me "they don't support macs." After a couple of google searches, I realized that this Linksys router was all but completely incompatible with Macs. The only solution that began to address the problem was installing the firmware update on my Mac. Well, I was up till 3:30 in the morning trying to get that to work and after being frustrated to the point of tears several times, I finally got it to work.

The next morning it STILL worked...for about six or seven hours. Then, the entire network went down. Ron spent another hour on the phone with Linksys, setting up the entire network again (this time named "ronismadashell"). But it would only work for about fifteen minutes at a time.

SO, we went back to Best Buy and thought we'd give D Link a try (for those of you keeping score, that's Microsoft 0, Netgear 0, Linksys 0). Again, the "quick" setup was a big ole lie. This time it took about an hour on the phone with D Link AND BellSouth, Ron's ISP. This network was named "ThisBetterWork" and it did...for about THREE hours.

And here is where the story gets REALLY ridiculous (as if it wasn't already). I call D Link and they run a few test and it seems the DSL connection is down all together. So I call Bell South and they ask me to check the cords. I scoff and inform them the cord JUST came out of the box and was working fine for a couple of hours. But we try a few other things and nothing happens so I go ahead and switch back to the old Ethernet cord and IT STARS FRACKING WORKING AGAIN. After all that, it actually was a burned out cord.

UNFREAKING BELIEVABLE.

The network has now been up and running for almost 24 hours...we're all holding our breath. Because as fun as it is to spend the holidays with customer service representatives half a world away, I'm really hoping to spend it with my family. Or at least ignoring them, while I play on the internet. ;)