I just rang tech support to report a problem of random intermittant connection. It's only been happening since this morning.
The agent I got through to was of course in India and claimed her name was 'rachel'.
What annoyed me originally was she simply could not understand my postcode and 3 times she had to confirm my name.
She told me (in that script-reading way) that we had to reboot the pc and modem.
I asked her what good that would do, she told me it sometimes corrects the fault. When I told her I'd already done that each time my connection dropped, she told me we could not proceed any further until we'd done that.
I complied, she asked me if that had solved the problem.
How would I know!!! The problem is a random intmermittant connection!!
She then told me to switch my firewall and antivirus off (that old chestnut
) and asked if my connection was ok then.
I reminded her a third time that the problem was 'random' ie it could happen at anytime.
She then told me to reboot the machine and start up in safe mode with networking which I did. She asked me if I was able to browse like that, to which I answered I could.
She then proceeded to tell me that the fault could only be with my firewall.
I tried to tell her for a fourth time that that it was RANDOM - ie just because I boot up in safe mode and can browse does NOT mean the problem is identified!! It just means that the problem (which is random) just had not occured!
All I had in return to this was "Sorry Mr David but what we have done so far has indicated to me that the firewall is the problem"
I told her I found very unhelpful and ended the call. I rang straight back.
Got through to a 'Sudhir'.
He seemed to get my postcode and house number the first time, which was encouraging. But he ended up going through the same script and blamed my firewall. When I told him about the fact that browsing in safe mode did not prove anything, he proceeded to tell me what a firewall is.
I asked him to stop as I know what it is and how it works and he then told me "Well this is where I think your problem is".
I've lost the will to live......
