Comment by dicriseg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dicriseg | Hacker News Reader

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This was definitely when tech support could still be fun. We didn't have tiers or scripts or anything, just a handful of people on shift answering calls. You kind of loved when you got one like this when the customer calling in also had a good attitude about it. Probably because you knew the call was going to eat up at least a quarter of your shift, and you got to think a little. It sure beat the 10th time that day you were walking someone through uninstalling and reinstalling TCP/IP on Win95/98/ME.

All these years later I really do still have anxiety when the phone rings, though. I have an irrational fear of picking up even when it's, like, my dad, or picking up the phone and having to call a business to ask a question or something.

Do you happen to remember what sort of system you had that still had an 8250 but extended into the >14.4kbps era? Was this just a super old machine in the mid 1990's, or something in the 486+ range and the motherboard manufacturer had a lot of late 80's chip stock?

I suspect they enjoyed talking to me because I sounded like a young woman (in a ~12 year old boy's body).

It was a no-name 486 DX2 66MHz from "Consumer's Distributing" (defunct soviet-style Canadian retailer), and a cheap model at that. 8250 was probably a cost-cutting measure they felt like they could get away with.

Most people probably bought internal modems so these UART issues wouldn't pop up. But we had bad experiences with IRQ conflicts locking up the mouse on a previous computer. Not an issue with Lynx/Pine/etc, but we wanted GUI and Netscape, so we were trying to avoid that. Unsure if our go-external plan made sense or not (does an internal hardware modem run its own UART or communicate over ISA to the board's serial port?).

It was a lot of calls, so I dutifully reinstalled the drivers and tried a lot of dialer strings.

> Unsure if our go-external plan made sense or not (does an internal hardware modem run its own UART or communicate over ISA to the board's serial port?).

Internal hardware modems had their own UART. A lot of them had DIP switches or jumpers where you'd set the IRQ and COM port. You needed to set them to a free IRQ/COM pair.

This will take you back in time: https://support.usr.com/support/5685/5685-files/spvc336.pdf

It was probably unusual for this ISP to deal with a bargain basement computer, but a premium external modem, and the incompatibilities that can result.

> I sounded like a young woman (in a ~12 year old boy's body)

You probably sounded like a generic adult woman at that age. Much younger, and your physical size keeps you from having the same resonance as an adult; much older, and your voice has started cracking.

But when I was 11 or 12, I could order pizza delivery, and they would always close with "Thanks for your order, Mrs. Devilbunny". Never got shunted off to the "I need to speak with an adult in the home to place this order" line.

It was kinda neat, although I never really thought of ways I could exploit it. (I wasn't devious enough at the time.) And then when I got devious enough, I had to wait two or three more years until the cracking stopped completely and I could be believed as an adult again.

    All these years later I really do still have anxiety 
    when the phone rings, though. I have an irrational 
    fear of picking up even when it's, like, my dad,

I feel you. Near the end of my mom's life there were a few years where I was on basically 24/7 phone alert in case she was rushed to the hospital again, etc. I was never really able to use vibrating alerts again after that. I just associate them with that stressful time.

For different but similar reasons I get anxiety spikes from Slack notification noises. Can't handle 'em.

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