I was going to title this post as "The Return of Dumb and Dumber", but thought it was better to leave that alone. Back in November, Dumb and Dumber spent some time at my house checking my internal wiring and such. They didn't fix my DSL connectivity problem.

A few days ago, I mentioned that I had spoken to "Doofus" as part of my first gray matter exercises post. On the day before yesterday (it's after midnight now and I have to remember which day I'm on), an unnamed technician called and asked if my connection was working right then. I told him yes, but that it wouldn't be in a few minutes. He said he'd check some other things. Since I didn't get another call within a couple of hours and the end of their work day was nearing, I called "Bonehead" and told her that I lost the connection less than 5 minutes after the unnamed technician called. I did more than banter with her; I exercised my balls of steel and had her apologizing multiple times. I explained that I'd been dealing with this crap for more than 4 months now. She assured me that the situation would be resolved soon.

I was up all night after that for 2 reasons: 1) Nighttime is only time I ever had a stable connection, and 2) My wife calls me on the IM at night and keeps me tied up for hours. Yesterday morning, after sleeping a mere 3 hours, my mother-in-law rudely awakened me by ringing my doorbell many, many times. As I staggered to the front door, ready to swear at the top of my lungs, I spotted Dumb and Dumber through the window standing off to the side. She was saved from my wrath.

After Dumb and Dumber spent more than 4 hours checking wiring again, they found a grounded wire at the nearby junction box. The ground was between that junction box and the primary junction box about a half-kilometer away — it wouldn't have affected my connection in any way. Dumb and Dumber thought they had the situation resolved with that and hooked their company laptop to where the line comes into my house, bypassing any wiring to my jacks. They got a connection on the first try and one of them had the audacity to tell me that the problem was with my internal wiring somewhere. Yeah, sure, right. He changed his tune when the connection suddenly dropped about 3 minutes later.

I went away (in order not to expose my temper) while they talked to the main office. In fact, I left the house and went off to visit neighbors. About an hour later, one of the technicians called me out on the road and told me the situation was resolved. I went back inside and they explained that they changed a line at the ISP, a port at the ISP, and the IP from the modem to the ISP and everything started working properly. In other words, they put my modem on a different node. In one of my past lives I was an IT manager for a huge telemarketing company, so I knew the nature of the problem from the very first time it happened and explained it to Doofus back then. It took them 4 months to figure it out themselves. The problem is that an Internet cafe was put on the same node with me back in September and it ate up all the available connections during the daytime hours that it was open for business.

I spoke to Doofus on the phone just before Dumb and Dumber left and verified that the connection was working. Is it fixed yet? I won't be sure until a week has passed without any down time that isn't caused by external forces such as a power outage, high voltage spike, or something of that nature. I have my fingers and toes crossed, my lucky rabbit's foot is losing all its hair from all the rubbing and my good luck pendant is starting to tarnish. I can only hope for the best and if everything works out, I will not longer be blogging as a vampire.