I just went over with a friend and his laptop to a more distant acquaintance who was having problems connecting to the Internet. Her daughter had been over earlier with her own computer so that she could read her own email, but that computer didn’t work either. I was accompanying a third machine to be connected to a neat little RCA box that Cogeco cable uses as their black box connection to the internet. You merely connect to the box, et voila, you’re online at 100Mb/s. Or at least that’s the theory — when it works.

So here I was tagging along in a purely supporting role as machine three tried its luck. And lucky it was. So everything seemed ok and we reconnected the original machine and it was working too — for a while. Then it started to complain that various web sites didn’t exist. You had to hit them two or three times before they responded, but eventually they did respond, and quickly too. “Aww, that’s just the domain name servers acting up”, I chimed in, “That’s easy to fix — don’t do anything and Cogeco will eventually fix it for us. It’s not our problem at all”. I was wrong, as it turned out. This wasn’t just a transient problem but the final stages of chronic net rot which had been going on for some time.

The trouble is when you offer an tech opinion and all you have are a faceless black box and two Windows machines at your disposal, you are at the mercy of shockingly uncommunicative hardware. I should have stayed dumb — with computers it is so easy to know too much and too little simultaneously on exactly the same topic. My own computer is a small and inexpensive dell that has run debian GNU/linux from new. Its Window’s license just sits and gathers dust.

People think that linux is a complicated geek thing, that ordinary mortals use simple systems like Windows or the Mac. But it isn’t so. I run debian on my machine for its simplicity and predictability. It uses simple, old, well-tried-and-tested software and just works. I had to learn the ways to use this stuff, but did so years and years ago, when software was less glossy but more predictable. Being forced to use a Windows machine is just painful. Everything requires a vast number of obscure mouse clicks, navigating through supposedly informative windows that never quite tell you what you want to know, and being “graphical” and not needing proper documentation, the help files are incomprehensible. And worse of all is the complexity and layers of overlapping systems that guarantee that nothing ever seems to work the same way twice. Why do people put up with this. For the consumer, computers today are more functional than ever but are harder to use. The result seems to be an overall reduction in genuine utility.

So anyway, after that long excursus into why I don’t know squat about Windows, I had thrust myself forward as knowing what was wrong with a Windows machine (I didn’t) and having no tools to actual deal with it, not even having a spare cable handy (a good prop when you don’t know what you are doing) I found myself doing what no man should ever have to do — phoning Tech Support without knowing what the problem was beforehand. Rumpole of the Bailey, when cross-examining, never asks a question to which he doesn’t know the answer; a nostrum that apparently applies to Tech Support as well! My previous experiences with Tech Support have been uniformly positive, and after a long progression from the simple to the complex, have always ended up with an actual solution. Not so this time.

Continued later …