So we get an angry call from a customer demanding that we come out to
fix their computer, because their Internet hasn't worked for a couple of
months.
Check the system logs, and yes - her link has been down for 13 days.
Since we have an automated system that calls every two days when a
customer is down for 48hours or longer, and then we have office staff
call nearly every day after that period until we get an answer. At
fourteen days, she had received no less than eight phone calls, none of
which had been answered. We are very proactive about customer outages.
Customer also had a long history of not responding to phone calls
and had twice not been at home when our tech made the 50 mile round trip
to her house. There was a bit of a history there.
Now that we had her on the phone, we dropped everything and sent the
nearest available tech to look at the problem. She has no idea how
much of an effort that is right now because we have had THREE major
hailstorms and multiple tornadoes come through our area in the last two
weeks and all of our service staff and contractors are booked solid for
two weeks to deal with radios damaged by the storms, ripped off of
roofs, or "re-aimed" by the strong winds.
It all boiled down to two simple things, one that is very common and one
that we had never come across before.
1) Her POE was plugged in backwards.
2) After plugging in the POE, she was still getting a "page could not
be displayed" page in Internet Explorer. Tech sat down and started
doing some testing to see what was going on. Pings were fine, email
seemed to work fine, technician's laptop got on and was able to do
everything normal on her connection. Plugged it back into her computer
and got the same error. Tech puts in our home page and it comes right
up. Checks browser settings and find out that she had set her HOME
PAGE to the dnserror.htm file (IE - the file that comes up when DNS
isn't working) - which was putting up an error everytime she started
her browser.
#...@#$%@#...@#$%@#!!!!!!!!!
Her next bill will have a $35 service call attached to it. I'd like to
deliver it wrapped around a large rock through a window, but we will
probably just put it in the mail.
Matt Larsen
vistabeam.com
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