A day amongst days

It's been a day. Or, rather, Day: it deserves to be capitalized.

I should have gone back to bed, when I walked into my office this morning and found our DSL modem lying on the floor of its cage with its feet in the air. Well, OK, not literally, but the power light was red and not green, and all the other lights blinked in perfect synchronization. Power cycling didn't break it of this habit, nor did jamming a Biro in the reset hole. This mother was pinin' for the fjords.

I tried doing what I could, including tethering my cell phone to my laptop to go look for online manuals. Phoned Qwest (no, not at random, the modem was provided by them) in case they had some arcane three-finger salute to fix it. Nope. It was kaput, and since I'd bought it instead of renting it, it was up to me to replace it.

The local Qwest store didn't open until 10am, but by then it was almost that time. So, I hopped into the car and went to buy a new one. In the meantime I worked out that I'd bought this modem on the 18th January last year. It had lasted 1 year and 2 weeks, just out of warranty.

As it happened, I had an appointment at 10:30 to get my eyes tested, right next door, walking distance. My eyesight has been getting worse, and I need some new glasses. So I go through all the tests (man, I hate the air puffer test) and get to see the optician. First thing out of his mouth: "why are you wearing distance glasses, when you can't focus close up?" Whaaa? Turns out that my previous (and only) prescription was all wrong. There was enough magnification in my glasses that I could read, but they weren't right at all. They were for seeing things at a distance. My eyes had been working overtime. Since they were my first pair of glasses I didn't realize. Holy crap.

Turns out that, although I have very healthy eyes (no cataracts, no glaucoma, etc), I need help at all focal lengths. So, I'm going to be getting trifocals; they're on order. Since I am having such problems reading close-up I asked whether they could replace the lenses in my current frames, just for reading until the new glasses arrive. No problem, and they took my glasses away for two hours to do it. I went back home.

Of course, I get home and suddenly realize I can't see or read a bloody thing. I can't install the friggin' modem, to be precise. No internet, can't read. Boring.

Two hours later I have my new lenses in my old frame (and wow can I ever see close up now! But I can't walk around in them, my eyesight is all fuzzy beyond two feet), and am installing the new Motorola DSL modem. Qwest have this program that does all the config for you. It connects the modem to their special site, yadda, yadda. Turns out that the "QuickConnect code" that came up by default was wrong. (Sorry, that should be QuickConnect.) There's a nice little "live chat" button on the form so I clicked that for help (the reason for not phoning is that you have to navigate through Qwest's automated phone system if you phone tech support, en...nun...cia...ting your words ve...ry care...ful...ly to re...ply to the ques...tions). Eventually, after having to reboot, I got in touch with Kathie. We went through a couple of things, they didn't work, and then she asked me to log into the PPP system with a different login. Of course, as soon as that happened, the special config connection was broken, as was my chat, and the login turned out to be wrong. Back to square one, except this time I phoned up.

To cut an already tedious story short, about 3pm, it was all up and running. Turns out I'd typed — actually, cut and pasted — the id with a space on the end and that was causing the login failure. Time to curse the programmer who didn't call Trim() on the input from the field.

Now to uninstall all the crap QuickConnect installed. Sigh. But at least I can read the prompts.

  Loading links to posts on similar topics...