Internet
Settle down, this is a long one, but it's drastically shortened from reality...

My mum had dialup with a company named after a fruit. Painfully slow, everyone else was on broadband, so I convinced her to get upgraded. BB modem turns up (the days before routers), we plug in... it doesn't work. She's got a month of dialup left, so we get online to troubleshoot. Nothing works. Many calls to tech support follow. Everything gets unplugged. The computer gets moved to the bedroom so the modem can be plugged into the "right" telephone socket. A new modem is sent. And another. Nothing works. WEEKS have passed, and the dialup is about to be cut off. ISP blame BT. BT are adamant nothing's wrong, and blame ISP. Eventually, in despair, we give up, she gets a refund, and goes back to dialup. For another YEAR. Eventually I can stand it no longer and tell her to get broadband, but to get it from BT so that nobody can pass the buck on the line fault and if there is a problem, they'll have to sort it.

So a BT BB modem turns up, and guess what? It doesn't work. And many tech support calls follow, and the computer is moved, and a new modem is sent out... and eventually they say "It might be a fault on the line." The line we knew was faulty a year ago. And one (possibly the only one) competent guy with a geordie accent promises us it'll get looked at. He phones us back the next day.

The line was faulty. Not actually *broken*, oh no, they didn't have to MEND anything. There was a dip switch set wrong at the exchange. Somebody moved the switch, and now everything's fine. They just couldn't be bothered checking last year. AAAAAGH.
(SonofRojBlake, Fri 24 Feb 2012, 9:39, 2 replies)

Ah dialup
I remember downloading Pink Floyd's 'Echoes' on dialup - it took a week. I was thinking about this the other day whilst downloading a film in about 3 minutes...
( snee held his breath since, Fri 24 Feb 2012, 11:43, closed)

Obfuscation comes with the territory
Similarly, one of our remote offices had intermittent connectivity problems, and the provider insisted it was our equipment. As our IT engineers could clearly see it was not, they kept at the provider.

... And the provider subsequently called to again deny it was their equipment, only to be told, amid gales of laughter, that our engineers had seen their tech replacing parts in the building's datacomm cabinet just before the problems cleared up completely.
( kila is reading clocks upside-down as usual, Sun 26 Feb 2012, 10:44, closed)