Signal to Noise

1.    When asked, “Are you using Windows XP?”, always, always, respond by saying, “Yes”, even if you’re using a Macintosh or an Amiga 500.  Trying to communicate with Time Warner support in a non-Windows networking dialect will triple the amount of time you spend on the phone.
2.    When asked, “Are you using a router?”, always, always, respond by saying, “No”, even if you are in fact using a router. The existence of a router is an immediate cause for finger-pointing by your Time Warner support rep, and though you may know thirty-four times more about networking than the Canadian gentleman on the other end of the line, the existence of your broadband router, which you’ve had for four years and has never even so much as hiccupped, will automatically be the problem. So, no router. Got that?
3.    No matter what they say, insist that your access just went down. Otherwise they’ll try to act like since you don’t know precisely when it went down, they can’t correlate it with a service outage “in your area”. And if they can’t do that, then they can say it’s your fault. It doesn’t matter when you actually noticed that your access went down. Always say “it just did, just now!”
4.    For added dramatic affect, tell them that you were surfing along just fine until you “got a bunch of blank web pages and your iTunes cut off in the middle of a download.”  Remember, you’ve got to give it to them in laymen’s terms. Don’t mention DNS errors or packet loss and these complex sayings will confuse your Time Warner support rep.
5.    Try to get “the local person” on the phone as soon as possible. Hopefully they will pity you because they live near you and actually get your issue resolved!