A day when everything goes wrong…

It seems there are days when we just should stay away from the internet and computers.

You wake up early morning and with the first coffee you go downstairs in the basement and fire up the computers to check email. You notice one labeled “paypal” and you start smiling: it must be a sale. No, it isn’t. It’s a notification that you paid $517 for a yearly license for a script that you don’t want to use and wanted to cancel after the free gift period. Yes, today is the day but you were charged at 3:22am. Not good…

OK, there is a phone number for the company in the notification email, so you call it. No luck: it’s a message from a ‘sister company’ advising you to login to their helpdesk. You go to the helpdesk site and you look for that special section for this script. There isn’t any. Then you go and login to the script’s site. Ah, here we go, there is a Contact link. Click!

Oh, it’s another helpdesk site. You still don’t want to go to Paypal for a refund request – so you submit a polite ticket, asking if a refund would be possible. You go to check your email – indeed, the ticket has been submitted and a staff member will reply.

Now you feel a little bit relieved, and want to check more mail. Error. The page doesn’t display. You try the other machine. Same: no internet connection. OK, we know the routine: disconnect, wait 30 seconds, reconnect, try again. Nothing. Let’s do it again. Same error: server not found.

Call your ISP. You explain the situation and they treat you like a 5th grader. Disconnect, wait, restart etc. The only thing we figure out: the router that has 3 computers connected by wire and two laptops wireless, doesn’t work. When you connect one computer directly to the ISP modem, there is internet.

You check if there is any reply from the helpdesk, but there is nothing.

You jump in the car and you go out and buy a new router: D-Link DIR-615 (N300). It’s on sale, so you save $20 (CAD). Back home you impatiently check the email: no reply from the helpdesk. Starting to contemplate to request a refund via Paypal.

You disconnect all the wires from the old G router, insert the CD for the new one and go with the installation, configuration. Finally, it works. You check all the computers, wired and wireless – everything seems to work. Of course, in the middle of installing with five wires in your two hands… your wife calls you to have a chat: the patient is a no-show, so she has time She is not happy that you are short and ask to hang up.

Now that the internet is working again, let’s go back to the Helpdesk. Nothing. The accumulated tension begins to drive you crazy and you submit a second long – very impatient! – ticket. You call again the phone number from the morning… and you leave a message. You go to the other helpdesks of these guys (where you were directed from the phone message) and start to submit tickets asking why do you send me here if this is not the place to submit a ticket for that script…

Then checking the email notifications for all these tickets — there is the reply for the first one: you got your refund, sorry it didn’t work for you etc.

This is the moment you feel dumb for all those additional tickets. Or maybe not. Because you’ll never know whether this was the “normal” waiting time for a reply or they finally got kicked by all those messages left in every possible place.

And now it is 16:00 (4:00 pm for those that can count only up to 12) and the whole day is screwed.
At least I have a new blog post. Better than nothing…