Back on 4th Jan 2014, I posted a story about how the Post Office tech support guy didn’t know what a static IP address was, well on Wednesday this week the same customer had to ring the Post Office again because his broadband was down. He had had an engineer visit the day before to fix a very noisy line but his broadband was still down.
So, he calls the Post Office and a lady on the tech support desk suggested that he reset his router and then leave it for a couple of hours for things to settle down. However, his broadband never reconnected and he rang me is desperation. So I drive a 50 mile round trip to sort out the problem.
When I get there I login to the router and check the logs which quite clearly pointed to an authentication error, meaning the username and password were likely incorrect. So I ring the Post Office. I speak to a very apologetic lady on the telephone who confirmed to me that authentication was in fact correct although I hadn’t confirmed nor asked for the username and password at this point. She could see on the logs their end that the account was OK, but the connection was failing to give out an IP address which is why the internet connection was down, and indeed I could see on the router that there was no public IP address. Because of the problem the customer was experiencing it was beyond her capabilities (Well off script shall we say) and she would have to push the query through to 2nd tier support.
At this point I say, can you give me the username and password of the broadband account please so that I can confirm that they are correct. Well she did, and they weren’t. When resetting the router of coarse, the username and password were reset. Once I had entered the correct values, up comes the connection. It turns out that the authentication log files she had looked at were before the customer had been asked to reset his router which of coarse would have been correct at the time and before the reset.
It really pee’s me off how tech support can ask people to reset devices then effectively walk away without going through how to check that the connection is correct, and I have never come across a situation where waiting a couple of hours after a reset is needed before the connection is re-established. Very poor service indeed.
