This is where it gets interesting...

[reynardo.livejournal.com]

Working the other night and a rather nervous and computer-illiterate lady calls up because her nephew wants her to switch her connection from the ethernet to the USB cable "because it's faster". Now apart from the straightforward fact that if the connection was able to work at full speed it would be the ethernet that went faster, according to our system she was connected by the ethernet and it was going like a dream.

Except that her Internet Browser was showing "Page Cannot be found". No worries - we get a lot of those and it's usally a firewall setting. So I ask her to hop into the Network Connections and see what's happening.

No connection.

Weird. Check the system from my end and it's still showing the ethernet connection chugging along like crazy, lots of lovely data streaming along it.

I ask her to look at the modem, (a Motorola 5100 with both ethernet and USB connection capability, but only one at a time). Check the cable that's coming from the top of it - does it have ends like a phone cord, except a little bit wider? Yes. So of the three cords coming out...

"There's four."

"I beg your pardon?"

"There's four cables coming out. One to the power point, one into the wall that your people put in that looks like an aerial, and two others."

"Oh really??? So, could you please trace that top cable and tell me where it goes?"

"... into a hole on the floor."

So lovely nephew has been sucking her data away, and wanted us to try and get her computer connected by the USB so he could continue with the closest thing I've seen to a vampire tap since thickwire became obsolete. Alas for him, but only one connection at a time is possible to the modem. Alas for us, because the lady had visitors right then and had to go.

I wish I knew what had happened next.