So today I decided I had really had enough. A couple of weeks ago the wifi wasn’t working so well. I’m in a house where the only two phone jacks are in the kitchen and the main bedroom, at either end of the house. There is a study right in the middle of the place, equidistant from both jacks, which shows the designer of the unti had no idea what the Internet was at the time of building. So I had the modem in the bedroom, and I was sensing that the wireless connection between my machine and the modem was fairly fragile given the consistent dropouts in connection.

So I decided I’d move the modem into the kitchen. The problem seemed to be resolved. No dropouts, no messages on my computer telling me that no modem could be found, yada yada. Everything was great for a few days. But a couple of days ago I had been noticing that, while the modem connection remained strong, I couldn’t seem to open any web pages, and when I did, download speeds had been reduced from the usual 150-160kBps down to around 20-40kBps. So I called my ISP.

My ISP is bigpond.com (if you live outside Australia you may not know that bigpond is the Internet arm of Telstra, the country’s largest phone company, once the only phone company - a government-owned monopoly, and likes to think it owns the country, since the country don’t own it no more). Claiming to be a customer of bigpond.com is kinda like saying you drive a Toyota Starlet or you’re favourite singer is Madonna. You get sniggers or pitiful looks. And you kinda know you deserve them. Bigpond.com was the best provider of ADSL in my town *at the time* (i.e. by no means is that true now) but I’m locked into a contract where my fees are at least 50% more than others’ and I swarmed by PR spin in every second email from them.

The guy on the other end of the phone was really helpful. We spent at least forty minutes talking, and he treated me like someone who knew a thing or two about the Internet, didn’t treat me like an idiot. But we went through all possible reasons for the slow connecton and the only conclusion he could come up with was that there some spyware on my computer that was accessing the Internet, thus slowing down what I was trying to do.

So I downloaded spybot search and destroy, and ran that program at the same time as the Microsoft version I already have (that we all know is as good at catching spyware on your computer as I am at catching salmon with a pair of tweasers). The conntecion was still slow. So the final resort - backup all my data, delete my profile, start a new profile.

Two hours later, success! For three minutes. I got to my homepage, downloaded a couple of emails, then couldn’t access my blog. Bugger.

I went out to dinner with a mate from work who’s the official IT guy, and he suggested I reinstall Windows. I wanted to throw pieces of my beef & black bean at him. Last time I did that I spent two days without sleep loading all my data and programs back up. I told him I didn’t want to do that.

I got home at 9, and at 9.10 I was on hold with bigpond help. At 10.40 I was still on hold, pressing the Refresh button on the computer over and over again until my pointing finger felt arthritic, humming a little tune about killing Telstra’s CEO and blowing up Silicon Valley, selling my kidney for a new computer yada yada yada.

Then a thought occurred to me. Why I don’t just fucking put the modem back in the bedroom, and see what happens? I did that, then I checked my emails, downloaded a couple of podcasts at full speed, and then I started writing this post. And when I’m finished doing that I’m going to think about what I’m going to say to bigpond.com when one of their marketers call me up and ask me questions about the nature of their service.