Your friend in the digital age.

My brief statement that I called Cox on Saturday morning about my lack of Internet connection doesn't begin to convey the full flavor of that call. Oh, it started out normally enough -- request for last four digits of my SSN, identification of my account, then the usual damned "If your neighbor severed your cable feed with his lawn mower, press 1. If he used a Weed-Whacker, press 2." phone tree. Until I got to the point where they actually gave me an option to press 42 to speak to tech support. Then it got, well, weird.

Naturally, all the "agents" were busy (of course, did you think they were just sitting there twiddling their thumbs waiting for you to call? And when did they become "agents", anyway?). So while I'm waiting for one of them to get done abusing another customer, do I get to listen to music, or a Cox ad pushing digital phone service? No, they've got something new since the last time I called in: I get to talk to a synthetic female who is going to try to figure out what's wrong before passing me off to a warm body.

I swear I am not making this up. Digital Maxina asks all these questions about my setup (and takes verbal replies -- none of this "Press 1 for Yes or 2 for No" shit for her!) and suggests things for me to try, like resetting the modem, all of which I have already done, but I do them again because this damned AI doesn't really give me any choice. It's like, "Now unplug your modem and plug it back in, and when you've done that say 'Continue'. Oh, by the way, it's OK to put the phone down while you do this." And by God she's going to sit there (in a virtual sense) and wait for me to say "Continue", and she's watching the modem for some activity so she's going to know if I'm bullshitting her by saying "Continue" without actually trying to reset the modem, so what am I gonna do? I'm going to reset the damned modem again!

I kept waiting for her to say something truly helpful, such as "If you'd like to stop humoring me and just go on hold till a warm body is available, say 'Stop'!" Fuggedaboudit. Oh, once, while waiting interminably for the modem to resync, in between perky acknowledgements that it sure was taking a long time, she did say, "By the way, if you were talking to an agent right now, you'd just be waiting for this to finish like you are now." In other words, don't fret about being stuck talking to an AI, because you wouldn't be any better off with with a warm body.

Well, when the modem refused to resync (I could see it wasn't doing anything), she finally gave up and turned me over to a warm body. And guess what? I really wasn't any better off. To begin with, the warm body didn't know shit about Macs. He did fumble through an attempt to renew the IP address, without success, and promptly gave up and said my network card must be bad and I'd have to call Apple about that. Well, I knew damned well there was nothing wrong with the network card, because the Mac could contact the router. So then I told him I had a Windows machine there that also couldn't connect. So he perked up a bit because he knew how to renew a DHCP lease in Windows using the ipconfig command at the command line. Whoo-ee! So we tried that. And guess what, it couldn't see the modem either. So now I guess he figured it wasn't so likely that two network cards were bad and decided my cable modem was shot instead, and since it was obsolete and not on their supported list any more, why didn't I just run out and buy a new one? I thanked him not so politely and said goodbye.

All things considered, I think I'd rather just get put on hold for half an hour. It would accomplish about the same thing.