The miseries of dealing with Govt Organisations...

Alright call me lazy. This morning i woke up to find my ever so efficient broadband connection dead. I was in a state of shock. Without hesitation, I'd called up the local customer care center here in Trivandrum and I got an appointment for the evening. Aaaaaaaaaah! How was I to survive the whole morning without exchanging bits of 1s and 0s to ppl around the world?!!?!? I would be cut off from civilization for just too long! Naheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! Alright once the whole drama queen session was done with i decided to get some sleep and wake up when I was a little more sane. Guess I needed a real long time for that 'coz i ended up waking up at 12pm!

Anyways, lets get back to my connection. Thought of doing some diagnosis on my own. With my excellent skills in networking (NOT!) I was determined to get my connection up and running before BSNL could even call me back and say they're coming. Sigh failed miserably, called up a friend of mine working in Dell and armed with his suggestions I tried again. All in vain! In protest I decided not to eat food until I got it working. But well my darling network adapters still wouldn't budge. Talk about arrogrance and being stubborn.

Few more hours of struggling and I figured that the DSL modem was working fine and so were the cables that connected it to my pc. Figured that it was some configuration fault and thanks to Bill Gates ingenuity of making things soooo simple, he had actually managed to do away with most of the tweaking options that were once available. Sigh...alright alright, Tux fans are gonna be real happy with this. Finally I get a call from the buggers at BSNL asking me to get out for once and open the gate! :) was sooo stuck onto my PC that i didn't realise they were standing in the sun waiting for me to open the door :) Thought my worries were finally over....sigh if only.

They came, checked the modem and actually duplicated my connection (don't ask me why, guess they felt that duplicating would force the NICs to behave and listen to the commands behest upon by his masters). You guessed it right, didn't help. They played around with the Ethernet cables, switching from one NIC to another (btw...i have two, the second one was meant for my internal home LAN which i never got to execute....lazy to pull the wires and do the trunking :)) all in vain. Finally they came to the conclusion that it would work in Win 98 but no WinXP...ironic since i've been using it on my Windows XP system for almost 3 months now. Oh well, they're the "engineers", I let them have it their way. Rebooted onto Win98 and thanks to the "plug and play" wonders of the OS it didn't detect either of my network cards. So they confirmed that it will work on Win98 and that it was not their fault.

They were fleeing immediately after that but I didn't let them out. Slammed the door shut and sealed all exits. Asked them to prove it, and I brought one of my ol' shabby laptops (alright alright its not mine, my sisters which I was supposed to have sold off six months ago...hehe I've already told u guys, I'm lazy). It took almost eternity to load and finally i got the network set up on it. Sadly for me, (something I already knew) it worked fine. And they said "See its working now we leave", I blinked and they were gone. Houdini would have been proud!

With my last ounce of energy, i sat back in front of my pc and decided to have one last shot at it. WinKey+Pause/Break, Hardware Tab, Device Manager, right-click NIC1, uninstall, right-click NIC2, uninstall, F5, new hardware found, your hardware is ready to use, close all windows, start, connect to...., bsnl, connect.....VOILA!!!!! It worked!!!!!

You have no idea how many times I'd banged my head on the wall for being sooooo stupid!! And well, I suddenly have a real big disregard for BSNL employees. I did the honour of asking them if they were engineers just before they left. They said they were and that they had never encountered a problem like this before and that they usually just install and go. It was not their duty to make sure that the OS understood what they did and worked as they wanted it to. Sigh...

Oh well, that's my story for the day. Moral of the story....Don't pick up the phone and dial BSNL's customer care for an Engineer to visit your house when the lazy engineer in you is screaming for exposure.

Doesn't make sense does it? hehe....i know it doesn't to me, but well im bad at literature :)

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