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Comment by mikecane | Hacker News Reader

That reminds me of the story Isaac Asimov told. He'd been given a TRS-80 desktop by Radio Shack to use. It worked fine until one day. He couldn't figure out why the hell it wouldn't turn on. He spent a lot of time trying to figure it out and was getting in a panic. He called Radio Shack and they sent over a tech who found the problem instantly. The computer wasn't plugged in!

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Several years ago, I called Comcast technical support because my cable Internet service stopped working. The support guy told me to unplug the Ethernet cable from both my computer and the cable modem, turn it around, and plug it back in.

Clearly he just wanted to make sure that it actually was connected properly... but I like to think he was making sure the Internet was flowing into my computer. With those unidirectional Ethernet cables you have to check.

That's a venerable trick for call center tech support. You can't ask the customer "Is it plugged in?". They will ALWAYS say yes and get mad, "do you think I'm an idiot?" But tell them to do something else with the connection in question, like "turn it around" or "blow dust out of it", and usually they'll actually do it and figure out if it wasn't plugged in.

"Please reboot your computer" serves a similar purpose. Rebooting hasn't actually fixed any network connectivity troubles since approximately Windows 95, but the action serves as proof that 1) the customer actually has a computer, 2) they are at it, and 3) it's turned on. They really will have those basic facts wrong and lie about them if directly asked. ("Their computer" could be at their nephew's house, or be a TV.)

Well rebooting will flush dns, where walking someone through cmd would probably be a lot more painful.

I actually called Comcast for the same reason. We got it down to the fact that the cable modem and my wireless router weren't seeing each other, based on what she saw from her end plus what I told her I could see on my end. We decided to try a different Ethernet cable. In the process of doing that, I realized that I had been prettying up the cables earlier (a fact I had already forgotten about) and had plugged the cable back into the wrong port. Stupid mistakes. If she had me try "reversing the cable" or "blowing the dust out" it would have had the same end result. Boy, I felt dumb!

In my first job I had a coworker that always was teasing me. Once I got really angry at him. I went to his desk and loosened (not simply disconnected) his keyboard plug, while talking to him. Rest of people noticed what I was doing, but not him.

He could type for a while after I was back to my desk and before the keyboard went dead and he started to curse about a quarter of an hour of work lost. Everybody was laughing out loud, and louder because he was seeing that I had something to do with it but he can't figure out what.

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