Barbara J. Hamby

Techie Toons

This morning, after rising late, I went to my computer. Yesterday I had cleared the deck to start right in writing today. But first, a quick check of my email. Wrong. My relatively new Broadband service would not connect me. I tried all the gimmicks my internet service providers offered, as well as my Broadband services’s troubleshooting.

After jumping through hoops and learning that all three computers on our network would not connect through Broadband, and struggling for a half hour or so, I called my ISP technical representative. When she answered, “Song of India” dripped in her accent. She was very helpful and spoke distinctly, but too speedily for me to catch everything she said. The gist was that it was not their problem; it was probably the Broadband service provider. So I called them, told him I had just spoken to a techie in India who thought his company was my problem. He disguised his accent well enough that I couldn’t tell if I were talking to India or Mexico or some other outsourced resource.

He walked me through rebooting all the equipment and, when I could still not connect on one computer, suggested that I needed to reinstall Internet Explorer on that computer only.

After I hung up and digested all that I’d heard, I tried logging in on all three computers and all of them worked, as if by magic. Unfortunately, I don’t know what I did right, but it’s back to work time.