[nflug] ISP troubleshooting from a TW employee's point of view

[Daniel V]

I work at Time Warner Cable.

This is my own opinion and is not offical Time Warner
opinion.

Sometimes "customers" mention that they are "MCSE's"
or something "special" like a network engineer, and
then, for whatever reason, don't like to hear it when
I tell them that we need to do troubleshooting, or
they don't like the results of the troubleshooting.
When I do try to do troubleshooting, it is the
so-called "special" people that are most likely to not
cooperate. 

I can't do anything about the waiting times, that's
beyond my pay grade, but I can help customers better
if they are cooperative and try to be nice.

I don't know how many "grunts" there are at Time
Warner, manning the help desk line, that have a clue
about GNU/Linux, but no matter what the average
technical ability of the average teammate of mine is,
it's more practical for a GNU/Linux geek to be
flexible and be able to either fire up a MS
Win2k/XP/Vista machine (you admin types make the big
bucks and can afford multiple computers with the
latest technology, unlike me) for tech support
purposes, or learn to give help desk the information
they need, and be able to do what is required. It's
not hard to renew the IP address in GNU/Linux, neither
is it hard to do a traceroute and give us the results.
I'm dealing with general variables here, these are
issues with affect any ISP.

There's the chemistry of the representative and the
customer to consider, and if there's at least
cooperation, and if you, the customer, can anticipate
what is needed, you'll have a much more productive
call. I can't tell you how many people call and can't
be bothered to have pencil/pen and paper handy.

Daniel


--- anthonyriga <torrodimerda at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Does anyone live near Hertel ave main st area
> experiencing problems with there TW internet
> connections. Mine has been intermittent for the last
> week and cant depend on it. After calling TW 4 times
> because they told me tier2 support  were too busy
> and
> 45 minute average was the hold time. Going through
> the
> reboot modem computer with tier 1, then getting tier
> 2
> to do the same then asked me to reinstall my nic
> card
> by trying to run me through some start>run procedure
> windows of course. When I told him I was using Linux
> he said "we dont support Linux". I finally got
> someone
> to come out and look at the cable lines and test
> signals the wens 5-7pm. I tried telling the 2nd
> level
> that the traceroutes had some drops when hitting TW
> routers. Im no expert in networking and was not
> telling him how to do his job just trying to make
> both
> our lives simpler specially mine by seeing if there
> was a routing issue or a configuration provision.
> Seems sometimes their blame is either the OS or the
> nic card. Just frustrated with TW. 




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