Service Shmervice

I'll share this little anecdote: Last Saturday my DSL connection was down for a day. I did all the things I know how to do, rebooting several ways and times and attempting to connect and reconnect in various configurations. My modem said there was a DSL sync but no service. Odd.

I got on the phone and the guy on the other side of the world confirmed that there MIGHT be an outage in ChicagoIllinois. Okay. 8 hours later, I tried to try again. I called back to check on the outage, and the guy in 12 time zones away said that the outage has been mostly fixed, and have I tried rebooting? Calmly, I told him the many things that I had done, and by the way, here's the exact error message. His name was Mark.

Guy asks if I'm running IE7.

I say yes.

He says, well, let's uninstall it.

I say, huh?

He says, uninstall IE7, and we'll try to get it working with IE6.

Me: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. [I literally said that.]

He says it's the only thing that will work.

I say thank you, but I'm not doing that, because that's not the problem.

We say goodbye.

One hour later, my DSL was back up and running.