[dayjah]

This is me almost every time I interact with ISP support.

Except… recently I completely misdiagnosed something. So while I was getting politely frustrated with the support clerk, he was stepping me through a set of irrelevant seeming procedures which, indeed, resulted in identifying that a piece of hardware was broken.

In this case it was the fiber to Ethernet adapter my ISP uses. He needed me to verify that, at every step of the way, pieces of my infrastructure were not the cause of my flaky connection (they weren’t). However, as a final step he had me reboot the adapter and it didn’t start back up. Turns out this is a rare failure mode and the flaky network I’d been seeing was an early, year long, symptom of this issue.

[qup]

I did the even more dumbass version of this once.

I had DSL with a router and modem. I never had problems with it, never required reset etc. Over the years somehow I forgot and thought it was a combo router and modem.

Then when I finally had a problem, I insisted to customer support I had done many power cycles already. They scheduled a tech to come out, but I realized my mistake before it went that far at least.

A power cycle fixed the modem, of course.

[exikyut]

I went as far as going out to one of the local metro offices for my ISP in the city, to demonstrate some bizarre problem that I was experiencing with my combo router / modem.

I was actually able to demonstrate the issue in person, and everyone was scratching their heads trying to figure out what was going on.

I decided to try factory resetting it as a hail mary... and instantaneously I got a perfectly functioning ADSL connection.

It would have been far less embarrassing for me to have thought to try that and make the effort at home. lol