Never let ‘em see you geek…

So FiOS and I have NOT been getting along lately. For the last three or four months my Internet connection has had a tendency to drop down to dial-up speeds just when I need it most, a kind of electronic waterboarding that’s been driving me totally nuts.

Worse, though, was trying to get Verizon to do something about it. Couldn’t get anyone out to the house, got dozens of helpful firstline techs who patiently asked if I’d tried hooking directly to the wall, not the router, if I’d run speedtests, if I’d stood on one leg, hopping, while reciting the Declaration of Independence, all sorts of things.

As the weeks wore on, my yes-I-tried-thats became increasingly irritated. I’d spent almost 300 bucks on new wireless routers. I’d explained that I knew about tracert and ping and bloody stupid firewalls. I told them I understood registry fixes and browser reinstalls and that wireless will NEVER be as fast as wired (which isn’t necessarily true, but hey). No matter what I said, we’d end up at “well, looks fine here. Why don’t you call us back if you have any more problems?”

Finally, yesterday, I called Verizon, listened as the guy started the “well, let’s try hooking directly to the wall…” speech and interrupted. “Look,” I said firmly, “I don’t particularly care if you send a tech, wave a magic wand, or if the chairman of Verizon comes out here to personally reroute fibreoptic cable all the way to Kansas. On his knees. If I don’t have full speed on this connection by Monday, come and get your equipment so the Comcast guy can reinstall the cable modem.”

And today a very nice tech came out and fixed it. My connection’s finally back to speed (I hope permanently) and my left eye has stopped twitching.

“You shouldn’t have waited four months to get this fixed,” he gently scolded. Hey, I said, wasn’t my fault–I just couldn’t get you guys out here until I threatened to leave.

He looked sad. “That’s very bad when you have to get mad to get someone to help you,” he said, “but I’ll be honest. The problem was you told them too much.”

“You know, these guys on the phone, they hear that you know networks, and they’re thinking, ‘oh no, another geek to tell me how to do my job.’ All they want to do is get you off their backs because you’re gonna catch every mistake they make.”

(internally, thinking back on those support calls, I’m blushing scarlet…)

“See, what you do is, you don’t tell them what’s wrong. You just tell them it isn’t working,” he said, “You tell them you don’t know about computers, all you know is that you turn on the computer and the Internet shows up. Except now. It’s broken and you need help.”

“If you do that,” he promised, “they’ll send someone out to fix it.”

So now I know.

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