techrecovery | Extreme tech support

Don't you love tech support in adverse circumstances? Mine yesterday was two hours of troubleshooting my parents' wireless router while making sure my sister's ten-month-old did not reset the desktop computer or eat the cords of the two laptop computers, and the last half hour of which was spent with my sister telling me it wasn't worth troubleshooting, that they should buy a new router, and that it was probably "all Comcast's fault anyway."

Now, I'm all for blaming Comcast when they're at fault, like the 239842398744 times a day my Internet connection goes down, but how on Earth could it be their fault if any computer connected to the router with a cord works just fine on the Internet, but wireless isn't working?

I seriously wanted to shut her in the bathroom.

And just in case anyone wants to feel my joy vicariously, the WLAN light was on on the router, but both portable computers (Dell Latitude D630 and Thinkpad T60) insisted there was no wireless network to be discovered, and Linksys's own diagnostic program run on both laptops insisted that both laptops' radios were off (verifiably untrue as they could detect all our neighbors' wireless networks). GRRR.

I was there till 10:30PM getting harangued about how it was all Comcast's fault and how I should just give up and go home and that I was wasting all my time and all my sister's time. Yeah, spending my whole evening punting around a router is my idea of a good time.