Teresa’s new laptop has always given me trouble when I try to put it on-line. I could only get it to work when I had it running through the wireless router, and even then, I had to assign it a static IP address. I didn’t understand why but we got it working and that was all I needed at the time.
Now that the router is toast, I can’t get her computer to connect. My work laptop runs perfectly at the house and at work. Teresa’s laptop runs perfectly at work, but not at the house… Weird. I tried all the settings I could find. It just won’t recognize the internet at the house.
Finally, I called Dell Tech support hoping they could tell me what I was overlooking. After agonizing through a 10 minute voice menu, it gives me 4 options of what could be wrong. As soon as I said “internet” it told me to call my ISP and gave me the numbers for Earthlink and AOL. Then, it hung up on me.
So now I had to run through the 10 minute menu again. After finally getting a human I remembered that Dell moved all their tech support to India. It was surprised at how difficult it was to understand the techs through the accent. Maybe it’s just my American egocentric attitude but I would have guessed that if you work all day on the phone with English speaking people (the 10 minute voice menu hell I endured was all in English) that you should be able to annunciate the language a little better than that.
I told him the problem, he told me to hang on and put me on hold. 5 minutes later, another tech picks up and runs me through all the standard stuff that I already tried. We finally get to trying new things and it turned out it was the Winsock Catalog that needed to be reset. Very cool, now it works. I thanked her and she asked for my e-mail address for the obligatory “How did we do?” survey. After giving it to her she asked if it was all lower case… I was surprised to hear this. Shouldn’t a computer tech know that e-mail addresses aren’t case-sensitive? Ha-ha, silly little tech person, you don’t even know the simplest things do you? And I hung up feeling all special because I knew something she didn’t.
Well, as usual, I was dead wrong. A simple search told me that case-sensitive e-mail addresses are actually quite common when you go outside of the easy, prepared and sterilized world of “end-user”. You’ll see it a lot with businesses internal e-mail systems. Programmers that use SMTP already know this and apparently, much of the world already knows this. It’s just me back here in the stone age completely ignorant of all this stuff going on around me. I’m so tired of knowing things that turn out to be incorrect. I should hide these kinds of ignorant moments to myself instead of posting them up here for all to see but I don’t think it’s any secret that I really am getting dumber by the minute…
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