What is the plural of "doofus"?
For the past week, the house has been without internet service, and largely without phone service.
It started when we tried to have the phone service switched from Bell to Rogers, leaving behind the internet service. I don't want to switch the internet stuff yet because I have my personal webspace hosted by Sympatico (Rogers doesn't offer that at all), and the E-mail address that I've used for a long time for more important purposes is also on Sympatico. I need to get a domain that will be independent of the service provider, and transition to that. But Rogers has some phone service features that we want, which are significantly less expensive than we'd have to pay than with Bell. We were assured that the switch-over, retaining my old phone number, would be simple. No trouble.
Rogers doofus #0 - a numbering convention I'll use for simplicity - was a no-show. He sent a message: "I came but there was no one home. You'll need to call to reschedule." There was, in fact, somebody at home at all times through that day. Well, I suppose that's one way to catch up when you're behind schedule on your service calls.
Rogers doofus #1 came last Tuesday, unplugged a lot of stuff in the basement, and left. He plugged our portable phone in, next to the cable box, so we at least had some phone service via that phone handset. No internet.
Rogers doofus #2 came on Thursday, moved some cables around in the basement, and was able to reestablish phone service to the basement and ground floor. Still no phone service upstairs, and no internet. He said that there was too much mold in the basement for him to work; even the breath masks we've got weren't good enough for him. (There is some mold in the other half of the basement, and yes, some people are more sensitive to it than others. It doesn't bother me at all, which makes it hard for me to appreciate the severity of the problem.) He said that he'd have to get people with special protective equipment to finish the job.
Rogers told us that someone would be there "tomorrow". Then it was "two business days", which took it past the weekend.
A Rogers senior service inspector came on Tuesday for a quick look. We pointed out the current state of things, showed him the wiring in the basement and upstairs. He was baffled by the problems and said that the wiring solution was obvious, and that he'd have an experienced guy in on Wednesday and it should take him about 20 minutes.
Later on Tuesday, the designated service guy called us and asked us to explain his instructions. We told him to call the inspector and have him give whatever explanation he needed.
Rogers doofus #3 arrived on Wednesday. He was able to restore the rest of the phone jacks and told us that the internet stuff ought to be working, as far as he could tell; he'd wired up a separate jack for the modem. But since it didn't work, and he'd connected it directly to the Bell "demarc point", the problem was probably that a "dry loop" hadn't been set up for the line when it was switched over from having both phone and internet service. That was something that we'd have to have Bell fix.
I should point out that all of this stuff involved spending much too much time listening to "hold" "music" on Rogers' service phone number. It's repetitive and insanity-inducing. Bell's "hold" "music" isn't quite so awful, but I've still had to hear too much of it.
The Bell people said that the dry loop had been set up at the time that the phone number had been switched over, the previous week. They said that they were able to do some diagnostics on the modem (which appeared to confirm that it had at least been connected to their network) but couldn't get it to synchronize. They would need to send a service guy...
Shortly after that call, I took a look at the cabling upstairs to see what the last Rogers doofus had done. I'd expected him to connect the modem up to one of the many unused phone wires that were accessible in the basement and in our second bedroom. Instead, he'd apparently used the second wire pair that's standard in phone cabling. And when I looked at what he'd left behind in the bedroom, I found:
Now, the notable thing about this isn't the mess of wires. I'd pulled that out of the wall myself, to show him that he had many options to choose from in terms of wire pairs that were completely unused. It's apparently the remains of a cabling hookup for some kind of earlier work-from-home computer network thing. The notable thing is this:
The guy had just twisted the wires together and left them bare. If that had been pushed back into the wall, they'd probably have shorted out. I was completely boggled. I've never seen that kind of sloppiness... not to mention that it didn't work.
Bell doofus #1 was here today. I showed him everything, pointed out the problems and the big set of wires that he could use. He said that he couldn't get any signal from the modem at all, and guessed that the people at the office who'd tested it must have used a wrong number and got the wrong modem. He spent about an hour poking at things upstairs and downstairs. And he was pretty quiet, so much so that we didn't even notice that he'd left. We had a couple of the local teenagers helping us with the yard work, and they told us that he'd left about twenty minutes earlier. And when I checked, I found that nothing worked. No phones, no internet. There was no dial tone on any of the jacks I tried, just an annoying buzzing sound.
Yay.
We called Bell on mentisiterinvit's cell phone, and after ¾ of an hour of the usual routine of first-level service droid tests (pull out the cable and plug it back in, cycle the power...) and second-level service droid (who apparently got the wrong phone number from the first-level guy), we've got another service critter scheduled for tomorrow morning. Again, yay.
So: what is the plural of "doofus"? "Doofi"? "Doofoi"? "Doofes"? And then, what's the collective noun? A clusterf*ck of doofes?
After supper, I went down to the basement. It took me about two minutes of observation and analysis to disconnect the Rogers modem from the jack it was plugged into, and plug the portable phone into the Rogers box. Result: limited but working phone service. And that disconnection changed the horrible buzzing noise on the rest of the phone jacks into a dial tone, and when I plugged the modem into a phone jack, it worked. Working internet. Apparently Bell doofus #1 had connected the two networks in parallel, resulting in horrible noise and neither working.
Also, he had "fixed" the bare wiring thing in the second bedroom by completely disconnecting everything from the bundle of cables, including the phone jack and the cable extension to my office, and stuffing them all back into the wall.
At present, the modem/router is connected via a long phone cord from my office upstairs, down to a jack in the living room. I don't have a wireless modem on my office computer and have to use a direct cable, else I'd just leave the modem/router in the living room.
Obviously, this is not acceptable communications work. We want the two companies to get things working properly. It's slightly tempting to try to get them to both send service critters at the same time and let them fight to the death or something, and the main problem with that idea is that their service "windows" are far too long - the odds are much against having them both around at the same time in that "8 a.m. to noon, noon to 6 p.m." slot. It's somewhat more tempting to fix the problem myself, because the odds are pretty good that I can do a better job, much more quickly, with much less aggravation.
There is sometimes the question: Which is worse, Bell or Rogers? And I think that the only good answer is "Whichever of the two you had to deal with most recently."
It started when we tried to have the phone service switched from Bell to Rogers, leaving behind the internet service. I don't want to switch the internet stuff yet because I have my personal webspace hosted by Sympatico (Rogers doesn't offer that at all), and the E-mail address that I've used for a long time for more important purposes is also on Sympatico. I need to get a domain that will be independent of the service provider, and transition to that. But Rogers has some phone service features that we want, which are significantly less expensive than we'd have to pay than with Bell. We were assured that the switch-over, retaining my old phone number, would be simple. No trouble.
Rogers doofus #0 - a numbering convention I'll use for simplicity - was a no-show. He sent a message: "I came but there was no one home. You'll need to call to reschedule." There was, in fact, somebody at home at all times through that day. Well, I suppose that's one way to catch up when you're behind schedule on your service calls.
Rogers doofus #1 came last Tuesday, unplugged a lot of stuff in the basement, and left. He plugged our portable phone in, next to the cable box, so we at least had some phone service via that phone handset. No internet.
Rogers doofus #2 came on Thursday, moved some cables around in the basement, and was able to reestablish phone service to the basement and ground floor. Still no phone service upstairs, and no internet. He said that there was too much mold in the basement for him to work; even the breath masks we've got weren't good enough for him. (There is some mold in the other half of the basement, and yes, some people are more sensitive to it than others. It doesn't bother me at all, which makes it hard for me to appreciate the severity of the problem.) He said that he'd have to get people with special protective equipment to finish the job.
Rogers told us that someone would be there "tomorrow". Then it was "two business days", which took it past the weekend.
A Rogers senior service inspector came on Tuesday for a quick look. We pointed out the current state of things, showed him the wiring in the basement and upstairs. He was baffled by the problems and said that the wiring solution was obvious, and that he'd have an experienced guy in on Wednesday and it should take him about 20 minutes.
Later on Tuesday, the designated service guy called us and asked us to explain his instructions. We told him to call the inspector and have him give whatever explanation he needed.
Rogers doofus #3 arrived on Wednesday. He was able to restore the rest of the phone jacks and told us that the internet stuff ought to be working, as far as he could tell; he'd wired up a separate jack for the modem. But since it didn't work, and he'd connected it directly to the Bell "demarc point", the problem was probably that a "dry loop" hadn't been set up for the line when it was switched over from having both phone and internet service. That was something that we'd have to have Bell fix.
I should point out that all of this stuff involved spending much too much time listening to "hold" "music" on Rogers' service phone number. It's repetitive and insanity-inducing. Bell's "hold" "music" isn't quite so awful, but I've still had to hear too much of it.
The Bell people said that the dry loop had been set up at the time that the phone number had been switched over, the previous week. They said that they were able to do some diagnostics on the modem (which appeared to confirm that it had at least been connected to their network) but couldn't get it to synchronize. They would need to send a service guy...
Shortly after that call, I took a look at the cabling upstairs to see what the last Rogers doofus had done. I'd expected him to connect the modem up to one of the many unused phone wires that were accessible in the basement and in our second bedroom. Instead, he'd apparently used the second wire pair that's standard in phone cabling. And when I looked at what he'd left behind in the bedroom, I found:
Now, the notable thing about this isn't the mess of wires. I'd pulled that out of the wall myself, to show him that he had many options to choose from in terms of wire pairs that were completely unused. It's apparently the remains of a cabling hookup for some kind of earlier work-from-home computer network thing. The notable thing is this:
The guy had just twisted the wires together and left them bare. If that had been pushed back into the wall, they'd probably have shorted out. I was completely boggled. I've never seen that kind of sloppiness... not to mention that it didn't work.
Bell doofus #1 was here today. I showed him everything, pointed out the problems and the big set of wires that he could use. He said that he couldn't get any signal from the modem at all, and guessed that the people at the office who'd tested it must have used a wrong number and got the wrong modem. He spent about an hour poking at things upstairs and downstairs. And he was pretty quiet, so much so that we didn't even notice that he'd left. We had a couple of the local teenagers helping us with the yard work, and they told us that he'd left about twenty minutes earlier. And when I checked, I found that nothing worked. No phones, no internet. There was no dial tone on any of the jacks I tried, just an annoying buzzing sound.
Yay.
We called Bell on mentisiterinvit's cell phone, and after ¾ of an hour of the usual routine of first-level service droid tests (pull out the cable and plug it back in, cycle the power...) and second-level service droid (who apparently got the wrong phone number from the first-level guy), we've got another service critter scheduled for tomorrow morning. Again, yay.
So: what is the plural of "doofus"? "Doofi"? "Doofoi"? "Doofes"? And then, what's the collective noun? A clusterf*ck of doofes?
After supper, I went down to the basement. It took me about two minutes of observation and analysis to disconnect the Rogers modem from the jack it was plugged into, and plug the portable phone into the Rogers box. Result: limited but working phone service. And that disconnection changed the horrible buzzing noise on the rest of the phone jacks into a dial tone, and when I plugged the modem into a phone jack, it worked. Working internet. Apparently Bell doofus #1 had connected the two networks in parallel, resulting in horrible noise and neither working.
Also, he had "fixed" the bare wiring thing in the second bedroom by completely disconnecting everything from the bundle of cables, including the phone jack and the cable extension to my office, and stuffing them all back into the wall.
At present, the modem/router is connected via a long phone cord from my office upstairs, down to a jack in the living room. I don't have a wireless modem on my office computer and have to use a direct cable, else I'd just leave the modem/router in the living room.
Obviously, this is not acceptable communications work. We want the two companies to get things working properly. It's slightly tempting to try to get them to both send service critters at the same time and let them fight to the death or something, and the main problem with that idea is that their service "windows" are far too long - the odds are much against having them both around at the same time in that "8 a.m. to noon, noon to 6 p.m." slot. It's somewhat more tempting to fix the problem myself, because the odds are pretty good that I can do a better job, much more quickly, with much less aggravation.
There is sometimes the question: Which is worse, Bell or Rogers? And I think that the only good answer is "Whichever of the two you had to deal with most recently."