How not to do tech support

Wow, poor Les is having some serious sleep deprivation hallucinations. The really weird part is that they don't own a cat.

Uh-oh! Indeed. Wonder why Dr. Drew thinks he could have just do his passive dump of Dawn Weston when she lives in the same building as Vera Shields and Mary Worth? This situation is too complicated for a simple intervention. [cue voice of Waylon Jennings] How is Mary Worth gonna meddle her way out of this one?

Jeremy is really pushing the parental limits regarding their tolerance of his snarkiness toward them.

Last night, Walter had the twice yearly conversation with our Internet provider (was Myriad, became TCA, became Cox and is now SuddenLink) regarding our IPs. We pay for two IPs but twice a year we get cut down to one. One computer can get on while the other cannot. Restart everything. The computer that turns on first acquires the IP. Make phone call. Tech support looks at account, sees two IPs and makes the corrections and all is right for the next 6 months.

This is the first time this conversation has occurred under SuddenLink ownership. They replaced the relatively efficient Cox techs with retards (I don't mean this in the short bus/ Special Olympic sense but rather in the sense that this tech refused to think - a voluntary form of retardation). Walter carefully explained the problem to the tech and mentioned that this is a twice a year problem. Since the speaker was turned on the phone I heard both sides of the conversation. While Walter attempted to explain the problem, the tech tried to talk over him and Walter had to raise his voice to get him to stop and listen. The tech believed the problem was with a net card and refused to listen, think, look up our account or do anything to shake his belief in the net card problem. (Insert religion metaphor here)

A side note: during the semi yearly conversation the subject of a router comes up. A bit of advice in serving customers - it's none of your business why we don't use a router. We pay for two IPs and would like to have what we pay for. Your business is to make sure we have the service we pay for so shut up about the damn router.

Walter gave up on the call to the tech because he could not convince the tech that the problem had nothing to do with the net card and the tech gave up because of his belief in the mythological net card problem that was beyond his scope. Walter had to call again and got another tech because the retarded tech had really screwed up our connection. Connection restored with a single IP. The new tech couldn't help Walter with restoring the second IP so Walter worked on the problem on his own and got both of our computers connected to the Internet.

We will purchase a router this weekend but I wonder how many phone calls and e-mails it will take to get them to stop charging us for two IPs. I don't look forward to making the "We got the fucking router that your techs keeping asking about every time we call to demand service that we pay for so we no longer need the two IPs so stop charging us for them!" phone call. I don't like raising my voice at service people because nobody needs that kind of abuse but sometimes it is the only way to get some people to focus their thoughts on solving a particular problem.