techrecovery | Ignorance is no excuse for not listening to me.

Let me ~~repulse~~ regale you with a tale from the other day.

This lady calls my shop, says she needs someone to look at her computer... her cable modem is no longer working, etc etc... and, now I quote her, "I know nothing about computers!"

Ok, gratis phone support time. We have enough paid service calls today as it is, and I like to try and help out, so I ask her to look at her cable modem lights. Power good, cable good, no PC link. I ask her if she's called the cableco. She says she called them, they had her check her cables, everything looked good to them, so they told her that her NIC was bad and that she'd need to get her laptop serviced.

That's... rare.. so I have her check her cables, describing what an Ethernet jack and cable looks like, and if she has it plugged in.. she interrupts to say "I don't know, I know nothing about computers!"

Well, lady, if you listen to me you might learn something... eventually she manages to confirm for me that

1) there's a cable with wide modular plugs that looks like a fat phone cord.
2) it's plugged into what looks like a large phone jacks on
B) the cable modem and
5) the computer.

"Everything back there is plugged in the way it always was, but I know nothing about computers!" There are those magic words again. Grr.

So she agrees to a paid service call. I get out there, and there's a FREAKING USB CABLE SHOVED INTO THE RJ-45 JACK ON THE CABLE MODEM!

There is no way, if she had been listening to me, that a USB cable would have matched the description of the cable I asked her to look for, and that's just the start. If she had actually followed that cable like I asked her to, we would have discovered it was in a USB port on the PC end and... oh never mind.... I can't think that cluelessly without risking brain damage. On that note, how did that mess end up being anywhere close to OK as far as TS at the cableco was concerned?

Even after her ignorance cost her $75, she didn't listen to a word of the quick tutorial I attempted to give her on-site, her excuse being... you guessed it... "I know nothing about computers!"