Not, strictly-speaking, an ISP story. But an amusing tale nevertheless.
Once upon a time, I was involved in a massive fiber backbone installation/router exorcism for a state government agency in downtown Baltimore. My team was on-site for a few months (an eternity by our standards), and we were provided cube space in the same area as the agency's in-house tech support group.
Relations were very cordial with the boys on the Hell Desk. They made their coffee-making equipment available to us, and we made sure the donut box was never empty. An excellent symbiotic relationship. And, since most of the guys on my team had never done tech support before, seeing and hearing what these poor bastards had to put up with was quite educational.
Bright and early one morning, the Hell Desk was swamped. They were <b>all</b> on the phone. Naturally, the phone rang one more time. One of the guys punched "hold" and grabbed the new call. His face went slack, and he looked over at me imploringly.
Now, I'm a team player. So I nodded, walked over to one of their empty phones, and plunged into the icy-cold waters of tech support.
<blockquote>"Hello?"
"This is [a legendary luser. I had heard them talking about this one]. Why is the network down?"
"Mmmmm... well, I don't think anybody else is having a problem. Can you tell me what's happening?"</blockquote>
A long, winding conversation ensued. I dusted off my long-dormant NT skills and tried to figure out what the problem might be. <blockquote>"Has any new software been installed?"
"No."
"Have you changed offices?"
"No."
"Has anybody changed anything on your machine since you last used it?"
"No."
</blockquote>
Finally, pinging the box in question failed to yield results. I decided to walk down to her office, suspecting a dead NIC card.
When I got there, I plunked myself down in front of the keyboard and decided to take a look at her network settings. (For reasons too complicated to explain here, this agency used [shudder] static IP addresses.) My fingers paused when I saw the IP address for her default gateway.<blockquote>
"This can't be right." I pointed to the address on the screen.
"Do you know what this is?" I asked the luser.
"Oh. That's my birthdate. I typed it in to see what would happen."
"I see. Well, this is what happens."</blockquote>I called upstairs, got the correct IP address, suppressed the desire to strangle her or, at least, chop her fingers off, and went whistling away, content in the knowledge of a job well done. (Later that day, the luser in question was given a shiny new mandatory profile! No more poking about in Network Settings for her!)
That was my first (and, God willing, only) exposure to tech support. I don't know how they do it, the folks who man the Hell Desk. For my money, they got the toughest jobs in the IT industry. Me? I'll stick with routers, thanks. They only do what you tell them to!