The Internet? Is that thing still around?

Finally got internet back after 2 weeks of downtime. That’s DSL for you. Unfortunately, it’s meant no surfing from home, no blogging, and no torrent downloads (sigh). This problem necessitated a call to my ISP, along with many hours of troubleshooting the connection. My favourite tech support question was this one (I’d called from my land line, so that they would know my phone number from their caller-ID, and would be able to dig up my account file from that): “Have you got a dial tone your phone line?” I told them I refused to answer the question on the grounds that if they thought about it for a minute, they already had the answer.
In the end, it turned out to be Bell Canada’s problem — they switched something somewhere, and that caused a failure on more than one customer’s DSL line. Here’s a hint for anyone who’s troubleshooting DSL in the future: Don’t unplug your modem, unless it’s for a short period of time (i.e. for testing other phone jacks around your place). Apparently the phone company can check for modem sync remotely, and can’t help you if your modem’s unplugged. No one told me this, until a full week had passed.

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