I get a call from lady that starts off with her choking back tears already. Internet service has been out for less than fifteen minutes, and three minutes of that were spent on the phone getting to me.

I advise her of a known issue and that we are working on it. I can provide no exact ETA since the ticket is all of fifteen minutes old, but do say it’s likely within an hour or two.

Caller: “Do you know how much I pay for this, and you are denying me service!? And you won’t pay me!”

Me: “I can apply a 48-hour credit.”

Caller: “Completely unacceptable! Do you know how much I pay?!”

Me: “Yes, and I can apply a 48-hour credit, which is 46-47 more hours than the service will be out for.”

Caller: “Fine. How much is it?”

Me: “$3.” *They pay $1.50 a day.*

Caller: “OUTRAGOUS!”

She begins a tirade about how much she pays and how inconvenient this all is.

Me: “Okay, well, if that will be all, then you will be notified.”

Caller: “It’s not okay! How dare you say it’s okay!”

Me: “I didn’t say it was okay, I was just starting a sentence with the word ‘Okay’.”

Caller: “Your name. Give it. This call better be monitored. I will be seeing to it you get fired.”

Me: “Okay, well, if you want, I can send you to my supervisor right now.”

Caller: “No! Give me your name! I will call back and get someone more competent who can transfer me to your supervisor!”

Me: “Okay, so again, I am happy to send you there now.”

She proceeds to spend the next eleven minutes berating me, saying how awful I am at my job, and I need to learn to say sorry at the end of each sentence because she is the customer and that is the minimum she deserves from me. 

Eventually, it got to the point that I had to say:

Me: “If you aren’t willing to move to the next step, then I will release the call.”

She just flat out refused to get off the line until I got to the final warning of:

Me: “I am going to hang up now.”

I get a call from our company’s internet service provider.

ISP: “Hello, your contract is expiring, and we want to pick up the rented fibre router.”

Me: “I’ll see where in storage it currently is.”

ISP: “It should be active, because we see it is connected to Port XYZ in Bla Bla Street 42.”

Me: “Can’t be. The company moved from this office to the new office eight years ago. Way before my time.”

ISP: “I just performed a remote check, logged in, and it is perfectly operational as contracted. It also transmits fine, and I can see data going through.”

Me: “Okay, let me check, and I’ll get back to you.”

I review the checklist from the relocation eight years ago and find a fibre router marked with “Belongs to the ISP. Do not move,” and thus was not moved. The new tenant in that office just put their network equipment in the empty rack space below it and connected it.

The new tenant basically had free fibre connection for eight years, and no one noticed.

A strong storm is battering Scotland and North England at the time of this call, so we’re getting a lot of calls about the network being down in that area.

Caller: “I’ve been on hold for almost half an hour! Why has it taken so bloody long to speak to you?!”

Me: “As our automated message has been saying while you’ve been on hold, power is out in the north of the country due to a named storm, and this has affected internet connection to many of our customers, all of whom are calling in at the same time, massively increasing our call times.”

Caller: “Well, you should prioritise callers who are in the south and have genuine issues!”

Me: “Furthermore, despite being on a phone, you’re still in a line of people. However long we spend with a person will vary and may take longer if the person decides to ask more questions. Just like right now, there is someone currently waiting for me to finish with you and is now taking longer because I am answering your question about why you had to wait so long.”

Caller: “Let them wait! I had to!”

Me: “How can I help you today, sir?”

Caller: “My internet is down!”

Me: “I can see from my records that you’re calling from [location where the storm has hit]?”

Caller: “Yes, but the storm has passed my area now! It’s moved on! It should be back up!”

I take the time to explain to him why the storm will need to have passed entirely before we can even begin to start repairs. This explanation is, of course, unsatisfactory, and he spends another ten minutes telling me so before finally hanging up.

Next Caller: “I’ve been on hold for almost forty minutes! Are you all sleeping on the job over there or what?!”

Sigh…

CORRECTION: A typo has been corrected.

A customer is looking to get home wifi. She lives on a farm in a rural area, so we’re making sure we can cover her.

Me: “It looks like we should be able to get you set up at that address!”

Customer: “That’s great! But, uh… what about the wind? It’s super windy where I am.”

Me: “I don’t understand why that would be an issue, ma’am.”

Customer: “Well, I was told that when it’s windy, it blows the wifi away.”

This is not the first time a customer has come to me with this misconception. Usually, an explanation as to how electromagnetic signals work confuses them further, so I just tell them the wifi comes from the box inside the house, so the wind wouldn’t affect it. I try this, but it doesn’t prove as effective as it has in the past:

Customer: “But it gets super windy sometimes! And I want to be able to use my wifi in the garden when I’m doing my gardening.”

Me: “The wind won’t affect the signal, ma’am.”

Customer: “But I was told that it would.”

Me: “With respect, ma’am, whoever told you that is wrong.”

Customer: “How do you know?”

F*** it. Let’s go full science on this.

Me: “The wind would have to be going appreciably close to the speed of light, in order to cause air particles to give off radiation, which is what would interfere with the wifi signal. At these speeds, your router would be obliterated due to sandblasting, and the signal disruption would be a… secondary issue.”

Customer: “…oh, well, I don’t think it gets that windy out on the farm. I should be okay then!”

I woke up on Friday to find that my internet wasn’t working. At first, I thought it was a temporary outage, and I had errands to run, so I wasn’t worried too much, but when I got home, it still wasn’t working, and the broadband light on my modem was red.

I went through my internet’s companion app, but it couldn’t find anything and recommended sending a tech, but my Dad was coming into town, and he knows a thing or two about technology, so I figured I’d see if he knew what to do before calling one in. Dad arrives and agrees with the assessment that we need a tech, so we give the company a call. The AI isn’t very helpful, and there was a wait for a representative, so we set up a callback time. The callback comes around, and the conversation goes something like this:

Agent: “Hello, my name is Jason. Can I please have your name?”

Me: *Gives name.*

Agent: “Hello, my name is Jason. Can I please have your name?”

Me: *Gives name again.*

Agent: “If you are having trouble hearing me, please hang up.”

And that’s what we do (we’re not convinced he was a real person), but we call the number again and get an actual agent who sets us an appointment for Thursday.

Saturday rolls around, and I decide to take the modem up to the local internet company store to see if there is something wrong with the modem, but that ends up being a bust. However, when walking behind my apartment building, we notice a tech working on the box in the next building over. The tech tells us that the outage is due to a cut cable, and he was in the process of patching the wire into the next building, but he was on a tight schedule and didn’t have time to do ours. No worries, we now know what is causing the outage.

Sunday is pretty uneventful from the outage perspective, but we do call in to let the internet people know what is going on and manage to get my appointment moved to Wednesday.

Monday, I decided to go to my apartment complex’s office to let them know what’s going on. They promised to give the company a call to try to get things fixed before Wednesday. 

Tuesday rolls around, still no WiFi. I go to the office to get updates and am met with a visibly frustrated office manager who is also annoyed that my issue hadn’t been fixed. Apparently, a company truck had been in the complex, and she thought that they were there to fix things. She promises to keep writing them and asks me to update her as things go on.

Wednesday rolls around. The tech comes out and confirms what we already knew: a cut cable, and calls out a field tech (the same one who was there Saturday) to patch me in. The field tech arrives much sooner than I expected, and the problem is at least temporarily solved, although my internet is still a little jumpy.