The trouble with working from home...

... is that you are your own entertainment, source of conversation, admin, support, and... IT PERSON.

Today, inexplicably, my router punked out on me. Working fine, excellent, no problems, I'm jamming away and then... nothing. Can't connect to the internet, can't get emails. This was 4pm. It's now 6:20pm and I JUST finished call #3 to various inept technical support people (first the ISP and then the router manufacturer) and just got connected to the web. For the 2.5 hours of my life I wasted talking to a robot in Bangladesh, I paid the princely sum of $32.95. Granted, I now have internet connection but, in all fairness, they just repeated the exact same steps I had already done 2 hours prior, only it took them painstakingly much longer. (Yes, I know, "exact same" is terrible, redundant English but the double emphasis seemed appropriate.)

It never ceases to amaze me that you can go through all the steps you've learned over the years as a self-taught PC-fixer and then the minute you get on the phone with a dedicated IT person, they go through the same steps again and hey presto it works. I swear to God, it never fails.

However, I should be congratulated for not having punched-in any motherboards this evening. I was the bastion of calm and politeness, even when I was forced to listen to the tech person describing step 4 of the process they wanted me to go to, when I had already moved to step 10.

Having done it myself once, again with the ISP person, then with the ISP escalated support person, and then the router manufacturer tech person... by the time I got to the dude who wanted $32.95 to go through the same process, I should have been the one charging him for the support. Come to think of it, as I don't utilize the company's in-house tech-support, maybe I should ask for extra $$ for saving their resources for more productive tasks?

So, for those of you who bemoan having to get up and go to the office every day to earn your monthly wage, take heed in this experience. The next time you call your IT person to fix your misbehaving computer, think of me.

I'm off to respond to the emails I couldn't get at 4pm...