April 25, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:Warning: Long, geeky rant I
Warning: Long, geeky rant
I have been witness to many a fine theological debate about the existance of hell, and I have always wondered why they were wasting their time on such a pointless question. Obviously, there is a hell, only those who staff it have added an "p desk" on the end to make it sound more professional.
So my computer at work hasn't functioned for two weeks. More specifically, we have had a series of problems with the internet connection. First, the internet software refused to acknowlege the modem that came with my computer.
I uninstalled and reinstalled the software
I uninstalled and reinstalled the modem drivers.
I tested the phone line.
I changed the phone cord.
I uninstalled the internet software, uninstalled the drivers, removed the card, cycled the CPU, reinstalled the card, and reinstalled the software.
I bought a new, external modem, and connected it to the serial port.
Nothing worked.
This process is called troubleshooting, wherein you test the easiest and most obvious solutions, and therefrom proceed, using the information gleaned from earlier steps, to the more complicated and unobvious ones.
I called the makers of the new modem, on the off chance I'd bought a dud. Nope -- the modem worked.
I called the people at AT&T, who lead me through an exhaustive series of tests, at the end of which we'd determined:
1) I could use dial-up networking to connect to the access point
2) I could not get any IP service from this point. No pinging, etc.
3) I could not then disconnect from the service.
4) Once I had made this non-functional dial-up networking connection, dial-up networking would not, in the future, recognize the modem as functional until I had gone into the modem setup, removed it, and added it back.
[At this point, I want to head off any pre-emptive strikes from the friends and strangers who are, even now, tabbing over to their email software to compose a missive the primary message of which is "Get a real operating system". I am sitting in a trailer, not at home, not in a nice corporate environment where I have ample time and resources to fix things. Where, pray tell, am I going to download the drivers to fix my Linux internet connection, given that I have the only internet connection on the site? More importantly, I'm not in charge of purchasing. While I am second to none in my loathing for Windows ME, this is what the Fates have handed me, and like all tragic heroes, I am powerless to move against them.]
Having determined all this, we reached a consensus that most probably my Windows ME installation was FUBAR, and needed to be redone. A consensus with which the chirpy chick at the computer maker's tech support wholeheartedly agreed; she arranged to send me three CD's that would format my hard drive, reinstall all the OEM software, and leave it as pristinely functional as the day it was purchased. This re-tooling is what I spent my day doing.
And the #@%! thing still doesn't work.
Now I can get an internet connection for five minutes or so (time varies). After which, I lose my connection. Can't ping, nothing. Disconnecting and reconnecting produces -- you guessed it -- the same hardware error I got before. But this time, if I reboot, I can re-establish a connection (this was not true before). Every single time, the same thing: connect, lose connection, reboot, connect, etc.
So I apply my troubleshooting skills.
Is it the internet software? Almost certainly not -- the software's been replaced. The modem is a USR Sportster, the most common kind, and though it's one of them newfangled V.92 thangs, it's common enough that AT&T would have logged a known error by now, or at least an alert. If it is some strange interaction (most unlikely -- there's the dial-up netowrking layer in between, which USR has certainly tested as it will be the primary use of their product) then AT&T is going to have to do some coding. It's complicated and non-obvious; leave it for now.
Could it be the modem? Even more unlikely. Resetting the modem and trying to reconnect doesn't work. If the modem were the problem, either resetting would work -- or rebooting wouldn't. There is no variance in the success and failure of the various stages of the abovementioned cycle, now repeated about 30 times for effect. While it's vaguely conceivable that Windows ME has a bug that causes it to irreparably crash Dial-Up Networking whenever it loses contact with a non-functioning modem, this would almost certainly be a widely known error.
Could it be the motherboard? The most likely solution (or the serial port, which is attached to the motherboard, so what's the difference?). I know -- why would it crash two separate modems? No idea. But given the prevalance of the problem across two modems, a reformatted hard drive, and numerous software reinstallations, the only place left to look is a central failure.
But don't try to explain that to the folks who made my computer.
I spoke with a charming young boy from Canada, who, like most such people, has no idea what the hell he's doing. He has been given a book full of procedures to try, based on teh general nature of the problem. The minute he gets a vague clue about what happens inside that box he spends his time talking about, he will either be promoted, or leave. Until then, he venerates the Book with the same textual rigidity as the most devout Orthodox Jew. He spent five minutes trying to get me to walk through the modem testing procedures with me before I managed to knock it into his head that:
1) The modem had been tested
2) The software was not only new, but the ISP connection was pre-installed and thus unlikely to be the source of the problem
3) The phone line was working fine.
He put me on hold to talk to his "colleague".
For those uninitiated in the Way of the Help Desk, that "colleague" isn't a colleague, it's his boss. Or a former help-desk "engineer" who can tell a NIC from a knick-nack and has thus been put somewhere safe, where the users can't get to him. After five minutes or so, my Canadian returned to tell me that he was pretty sure it was the modem.
I pointed out that if it were the modem, it wouldn't fix itself every time I rebooted -- or it would fix itself when I turned it off and on.
He put me on hold to talk to his "colleague".
I rebooted the machine for the 31st time to see if it would perform the same trick. It did.
He returned with the opinion that it was the phone line.
Now, given the intermittent nature of the problem, this was perhaps a natural guess, if you hadn't talked directly to the person who knew what was going on, rather than the nineteen-year old who didn't. I told him, as gently as possible, that it wasn't the phone line.
He argued.
I layed out, with impeccable logic, all the reasons it wasn't the phone line:
1) I just moved trailers. The problem occurred in both trailers. Also, the people who isntalled the phone line tested it.
2) The problem isn't intermittent; it's calibrated exactly to the boot cycle. Which does not affect the phone lines.
3) The phone line works.
4) The problem does not vary with the phone line -- there are two modems in our trailer, and neither works.
Did they test it for Data he asked, after another trip to the "colleague". I'm in Manhattan, not Saskatchewan. Asking someone two feet from the trunk if they tested the line for data is like asking if they tested it for French
He was puzzled. We had a brief seminar on the causes of line failure: interference, pinching or clipping, physical degradation, or cables sub-standard for data transmission. None of which is an issue when you are using a brand new phone line sitting smack on top of the entire, newly refurbished fiber-optic infrastructure for the World Trade Center/World Financial Center area, and you're the only damn person using the line.
I told him I wanted a technician.
He -- I know, I'm repeating myself -- put me on hold for another "colleague" session.
He came back and said "I know you don't want to hear this, but I really think it's the line."
Now, the geeks who have been following this will know how overwhelming was my urge to say, "I know you don't want to hear this, but I really think you're an idiot. Let me talk to the $%@# escalation engineer."
But I am a lady. All I said was, "Could I please speak with your colleague? Maybe we can straighten this out."
ANother hold session.
"No."
"But we're not getting anywhere. I think that if we can just talk. . . "
"Callers can't talk with the Level 3 people".
Sounds like a cult, doesn't it? And believe me, I spent my next two hold sessions awash with pleasure at the idea of the spaceship coming to pick up the faceless moron who insisted that my problems were in the phone line. Certainly, the structure was cultish. Ordinary people cannot talk with the God of the Computer. Only through the priest, Help Desk Tech Level One, can you communicate with His Holiness. Ordinary mortals would be blinded by His radiance and struck dumb by the mellifluous harmonies of His voice. On this Rockhead I build My church.
What gets me is that I know exactly what the little rat bastard was doing. He didn't want to talk to me because he'd have to stop cruising for naked pictures of Anna Kournikova and pay attention. So he tells this kid, who has absorbed nothing so far except blind obedience to the sacred precept that We Must Not Deviate From The Book, some stupid thing to get me off the line in the hopes that by the time I call back, he'll be off his shift. In order to do this, he has to make it someone else's problem. Having had the modem, the AT&T software, and the cables convincingly refuted, he fell back on the one thing I couldn't test myself: the goddamn phone line. I argued. I begged. Dammit, I almost wept. But no dice. I am not allowed to call back until I get Verizon to check the line they checked three days ago when they installed it. At which point, presumably, some other rat bastard will have some other reason why I'm not his problem. And the kid will go on thinking that the best way to deal with technology problems is not to figure out what's wrong, but to pass it off to someone else. So that when he has Ascended to Level 3, he too will be able to deliver cryptic non-solutions to his ignorant acolytes.
Some days, it just doesn't pay to get out of bed.
Posted by Jane Galt at April 25, 2002 8:48 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links