this post was submitted on 17 May 2024
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Dude, ages ago when I did tech support. A simple question like: "are the lights on your modem on?" was met with a yes. Then after an hour of troubleshooting you find out, in fact, no they weren't on the entire time and the modem was unplugged. Like, you lied, you never even checked. The real questions then become: why was the modem unplugged? Who unplugged it? What reason does one have for unplugging their modem?
@USSEthernet @Murdoc why we used to ask them if one was blinking fast or slow, it made them actually look at the modem
I just want to say, as someone who is quite tech literate, these kinds of questions are incredibly annoying to get through. I called my ISP, and they tried walking me through restarting my router when I could ping their gateway already, but not the outside world (e.g. 1.1.1.1).
But then again, I've worked tech support and have been on the other end with tech illiterate people, so I get it.
I just wish "shibboleet" was a real thing.
Oh man that would be amazing. My ISP at some point stopped giving out modems with the internet contract and instead only offers these shitty routers with integrated modems. I read somewhere that you can still get a modem if you asked. So I called and spend 15 minutes trying to describe the difference between a router and a modem and gave up.
When I had DSL, I bought my own modem and connected it to the same router I used at a previous place. They when to charge ~$10/month, so I spent about $20 and got a basic modem.
My current internet is Ethernet at the wall, so no need for a modem, and AFAIK the company doesn't even provide routers (didn't ask, I just used the one I had). All I needed was the gateway, netmask, and our static (CGNATed) IP. They wrote that in a piece of paper, which I keep in my safe so I don't need to call them just because I reset my router or something.
I think they know who I am by now because I call pretty much every time the Internet goes out. It's a small company (only serves my town of 30-40k people), and I'm probably the only one with a ln enterprise-y router (Mikrotik) with a separate AP (Ubiquiti). Yet I still need to do the basic troubleshooting before they'll actually look into the traffic on their end.
I would like to just buy a modem but somehow I can’t find any cable modems in Germany. There are a few I could import from Amazon US but they apparently don’t support EuroDOCSIS. I used to have one from Cisco, provided by the ISP, that worked perfectly but with a contract change they demanded it back (a condition they did not tell me about and I’m still angry about that).
I don't know anything about modems in Germany, but I found this. I got it from this Reddit thread.
Thanks, it looks like it could be something but it only has DOCSIS 3.0, I will need to check if that’s enough.
Unfortunately if shibboleet were a thing tech illiterate users would quickly learn it and use it every time.
Maybe a rotating key, like with TOTP?
Yup. Many people have a tendency to tell someone what they think they want to hear. "Is the light on?" hmmm I think they want me to say yes so... "yes".
So you always have to make an effort to ask questions in a way that gives no indication of what the "correct" answer should be. Don't ask "is the value in that field set to xyz"? Instead ask "what is the value you see in that field?"
some people are so very afraid of being anything but perfect they will just lie about things and insist you're not doing enough to fix a problem with your service
I know someone who, when it's having a panic attack and is asked a question, it asks the person asking what the correct answer is. Even if they have no way of knowing.
And this is exactly why I always humour tech support when they're asking me which lights exactly are on, which colour, and their blinking patterns. I've already made the diagnosis yes the problem is on their end but it's not like they have a way to know I'm not full of shit.