When it comes to conflict, each of us has our own personal boiling point. Below that point, we tend to let it go, turn the other cheek, look the other way, get on with our lives. Above that point, we hang on to it, demand to speak to a manager, write angry letters, shout "see you in court!," flip them off and leave burning bags of dog shit on their doorstep.
I have a very high boiling point. I expect little, so I don't complain when I get it. I crave peace and quiet, so I work harder than most to preserve tranquility. I'm very busy, so I don't have time to bicker over minutiae. I hate attention, so I fear making a scene. And I care too much what others think of me, so I shy away from conflict.
If you have a low boiling point, I'll drive you crazy. You'll say: "How can you just sit there and let him walk all over you like that?" Meanwhile, you'll drive me crazy, what with the way you elevate every little slight into a deathmatch. If you would only choose your battles more judiciously.
Like I do. If I've left you with the impression that I'm a pacifist who never battles, I've unintentionally misled you, for in those very rare instances when a conflict manages to rise to my boiling point I turn into a berserker possessed by an unquenchable bloodlust. And this is a good thing, I think. It's an essential release that permits me to maintain my cool, calm, composed demeanor without bursting a blood vessel or spontaneously combusting. Everyone needs a crusade, to seek justice at all costs, to move heaven and scorched earth while elevating mole hills into mountains and forgetting all sense of proportion, damn the consequences. It can be very therapeutic. The key is to do it once or twice in a lifetime, not once or twice each day.
I say this from recent experience, having just concluded what I believe is the final battle in a drawn-out series of conflicts my chroniclers will no doubt dub the "The Great Cable War of 2004-2005."
It all started with my internet connection. A very simple connection, just a broadband cable piercing my house and connecting to a cable modem in my home office which, in turn, connected to a router and brought the internet to my desktop and my laptop. Although the router has wireless capabilities, I never used them, preferring instead to confine my surfing to the privacy of my home office where I can preserve as long as possible the illusion that I'm not wasting my life reading blogs.
This simple set-up provided years of trouble-free service until late last year when the connection started dropped a few times each day for a few seconds before restarting on its own. The flashing lights on the cable modem would go dark, then light up again, suggesting that the problem resided somewhere between the cable company and the modem.
As internet problems go, this is not a big problem because I never lost service for more than a few minutes. But I work on a secure VPN that shuts down whenever the connection dies for even a second, purging my unsaved work and requiring me to spend five minutes rebooting everything. Do this three or four times a day, every day, and pretty soon even this little problem will bubble up to the highest boiling point.
My cable company's help line utilizes an automated screening program designed to frustrate callers into hanging up. After the simulated female voice instructs you to unplug your modem, wait for 30 seconds, shut down your computer, wait for 30 seconds, unplug the computer from the wall, wait for 30 seconds, disconnect your house from the power grid, wait for 30 seconds, switch to an alternate power provider, wait for 30 seconds, you've either destroyed your phone pounding it into your desk or you're pulling out your hair in frustration that no one's invented an easy way to kill through the phone. And in case you're wondering, my cable company's phone program waits the 30 seconds after each instruction whether or not you comply, preventing wily callers from short-cutting their way through the menu to an operator.
It took about ten calls and two busted phones before I managed to make it through the menu to a human.
And once I made it through, the human greeted me and, before asking me to describe the problem, asked me to go through the same shutdown routine all over again.
It took only three more calls and one more phone before I managed to make it through the menu to a human and restrain myself from screaming unintelligibly.
And that's when I realized my problem was that I wasn't having a problem. The connection would reconnect itself by the time I made it to a human customer service operator, who would test my line remotely and conclude "everything checks out, problem solved" before trying to hang up on me. I'd insist it wasn't solved, I'd demand to speak to a manager, I'd threaten to write angry letters to the city's department of cable franchising, I'd shout "see you in court!" I'd flip them off, though they couldn't see it. I was on the verge of leaving a burning bag of dog shit on the cable company's doorstep when I finally got them to send someone out.
Thus began the skirmishing. They'd send out a technician. The technician would check my line, find all readings normal, and pack up to leave. I'd point out that it wasn't normal on four separate occasions today, showing him the outage log I'd started keeping during my battles with the customer service people, so he'd unplug and plug everything, twist the line connectors, turn the modem upside down then rightside up and perform whatever other voodoo moves he could think of to convince me that he was doing something to fix the problem. Then after twenty minutes, the technician would stand up, declare the problem solved and run for the door.
Within a few hours the modem lights would go out again. And again. And again.
Over the next ten months we saw at least a dozen different technicians, who attributed our problem variously to (1) stealing cable service (we weren't), (2) using an Apple computer (irrelevant), (3) unauthorized use of a router (no such authorization needed), (4) using the internet too much (true but irrelevant) and (5) rats in our attic (rats in attic -- true, rats eating cable -- false).
As I battled my way through the cable company's diabolically-designed defenses, I managed to procure better and better technicians, graduating from independent contractor hacks to line installers to dedicated troubleshooting repairmen. One of the latter confided in me that there was nothing he could do, for the problem was most likely a loose connection somewhere between the company and our house. That sort of problem is difficult to find and expensive to fix, he said, so it wouldn't be easy to get the cable company to do it.
By this point I was a raging maniac, a one-man blitzkrieg, having unleashed every weapon at my disposal in my unrelenting war to restore reliable internet access to my home. Except that burning bag of dog shit. Along the way I'd managed to squeeze a few months of free service out of them, I'd developed an intermittently constructive relationship with the customer service manager and I'd even gotten them to give me exact appointment times instead of those four hour windows, though they always up showed up two hours late. But I couldn't get them to work on the outside lines.
You may be wondering why I didn't just switch to DSL. I live too far out in the boonies for DSL, satellite internet service doesn't work with my VPN, when it's working at all, and running a dedicated T-1 line to my house would be way too expensive. So, as much as I wanted to leave the cable company, and as much as the cable company wanted me to leave, I couldn't. We were stuck with each other.
Hunkered in my trench, no clear path to victory, I wished I hadn't led such a conflict-free life. If I'd only allowed myself to boil over more often, I'd be able to draw upon a deep well of experience in these situations and find a way out, like one of those battle-hardened veterans with low boiling points.
So I called in reinforcements. My brother-in-law has the lowest boiling point of anyone I know, and perhaps for that reason he's a Green Beret when it comes to human conflict resolution. He's also a techie and, when he's visiting us, a voracious consumer of the massive audio and video files he downloads over our high speed connection. He has it all: intense anger, superior tactics, enough tech knowledge to sound like he knows what he's talking about and a burning desire to keep our connection humming.
My only regret is that I was out of town while he worked his magic. Somehow he managed, in one week, to summon the customer support manager and the technicians' manager to our house, to get them to run new wires to our house and, when that didn't work, to immediately commence a systematic line check from our house to the nearest node. He also swung another two months of free service and, to top it off, he got the cable company to throw in a year's free access to all of their premium channels, including HBO Select, which he now voraciously consumes when he's not downloading audio and video files on our connection.
After we happily hung the "mission accomplished" banner, pried my brother-in-law off our couch and sent him on his way with huzzahs and hearty backslaps, I returned to my office in time to see the VPN crash. Just like before. Having snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, I was dejected. My brother-in-law offered to "take it to the next level," but I declined, partly because I didn't have the heart to escalate the conflict any further, and partly because I didn't want to serve 5 to 15 as an accessory before the fact.
That night I reviewed my options, concluded I had none, and decided to surrender.
And that's when the power failed, plunging our entire house into darkness. I stayed seated at my desk for what seemed like hours, though it was only ten minutes or so, wallowing in this unexpected physical manifestation of my mood until the lights came on and the house started humming again and I looked up and noticed that although the computers remained dark, the cable modem's lights were flashing, indicating that my internet connection was once again active and that it was being used.
Used? Impossible! My computers were off. What could possibly.... And then I noticed my router, the one with the wireless capabilities that I never used. Its activity light was flashing too. Could someone be stealing my signal? Seems unlikely, for I live far from the nearest neighbor and my connection is protected by a firewall. So why are the lights flashing?
I unplugged the wireless router. The modem's activity light shut off. I plugged the modem directly into a computer, booted it up and opened the internet. The modem's activity light turned on. I shut the computer down. The modem's activity light shut off, just like it should. I booted the computer back up again, opened the VPN and left it on for a day. It didn't crash. I ran out and bought a cheap $40 router, one without wireless capabilities, plugged it in and, after three weeks of routing it to both computers, my internet connection has yet to crash.
Clearly, the wireless router was the culprit, though I have no idea how it managed to mess with my modem's connection. Perhaps someone was stealing my signal wirelessly, or perhaps the router merely acted as if someone were, intermittently interfering with my connection by overwhelming it with invented demands.
All's well that ends well, right?
Wrong. Having spent a year battling a cable company over a problem that wasn't its fault while racking up a massive butcher's bill in lost hair, spilled testosterone, wasted hours and a reduced lifespan, I can only ponder the pointless absurdity of it all and conclude, not for the first time, that it's very fortunate my boiling point isn't any lower. For me and for the world.
See "Getting Connections" (Verging on Pertinence) for another internet service war story.
Not that I'm a tech genius, but the router would have been one of the first things I would have targeted. What surprises me though, is that none of those certified, cable company guys came up with that idea. So much for skilled labor.
Posted by: shank | October 13, 2005 at 08:06 AM
Wow. I feel as though I've just been on hold for three weeks, interrupted sporadically by unsuccessful communications from Bangalore.
Posted by: R J Keefe | October 13, 2005 at 11:09 AM
How do you do it? How does the subject of internet connectivity problems become the saga of the Seige of Troy?
Today's internet technician is yesterday's postman. Sick 'em, Spot! Sick 'em.
...and thanks for the link. I'm expecting Verizon's legal dept to be yanking my chain shortly.
Posted by: DarkoV | October 13, 2005 at 12:23 PM
I once went through a similar hell, complete with muliple technician visits, swearing, and the flinging burning pile of dog crap impulses... it turned out, after the 900th visit, that the physical cables (ancient, some of the first cable lines laid in the US) running into my house for cable TV would deform on hot days, enough to distort the signal enough to freak out the cable modem, (but fine for tv)... Finally escaped to DSL... sorry you don't have that option..
if there are no neighbors nearby who could be sucking wifi signal for their mp3 gnutella server, then what is the possible source of wireless disturbance?? high voltage power lines? nearby radio station towers? maybe the main power line running into your house goes along the wall where the modem was located (can be a huge wireless frequency interfering item within a few feet)? do people who visit your place wearing pacemakes seem low-energy & exausted while at your house??
hey, another thing to worry about!!
as always, excellent writing.....
Posted by: andrew | October 13, 2005 at 01:05 PM
And that is officially the saddest story I've ever heard. To have all that self-righteous indignation resolve into guilt...
The only way I would be able to console myself would be the sure knowledge that not one of the techies thought to check the router either.
Posted by: Kyle | October 13, 2005 at 10:52 PM