A Beautiful Story About Family, Perseverance, and Connectivity (Failure)

Over the last 24 hours, my (late 70s) parents have been experiencing internet connectivity issues. By “experiencing internet connectivity issues,” I mean they have no idea how the internet does what it does, why it has stopped doing what it was doing, whether it lives inside the modem or the cloud or whether it stopped working because it rained yesterday afternoon.

At this point, I feel I need to make it clear that I dearly love my parents. I really do. Please bear that in mind as you read on.

I am my parents’ tech help desk (although my 8-year-old nephew is on notice that he has 2 years remaining before he is conscripted into full-time service, and I retire to a cabin in the mountains with guaranteed stable internet but no working phone line by which any tech tickets may be raised). My entire troubleshooting strategy for the last 24 hours has consisted of unplugging and replugging the modem, hoping for a Lazarus-like miracle.

By tonight, I had accepted my fate: tomorrow morning, I would need to call The Provider.

But then, against all natural and supernatural law, tonight The Provider called us.

They called my mother’s phone because it’s apparently the primary contact number.

Naturally, my mother immediately handed her phone to me because she had no idea what they were talking about beyond “internet man says something”.

I began speaking to the agent, only to discover that they could not speak to me until they had verified the account holder and received their explicit permission.

You might think that because they called my mother’s phone, she would be the account holder.

No.

It turns out the account holder is my father, a wonderful, wonderful man who understands less about internet connectivity than the Koi fish in the backyard pond.

So I handed the phone to him.

The agent asked my father to confirm all his personal information.

At this point my survival instincts kicked in because two weeks ago my mother accidentally gave credit card details to scammers, and I realised I was one sentence away from hearing Dad calmly read out his bank password to a criminal syndicate. Though, as you will soon discover, I needn’t have worried because I’m not sure my Dad even knows he has a bank password.

After several minutes of being ready to pounce and rip the phone out of my father’s hand, I determined this was not a scam. This call was indeed coming from a legitimate, though very much offshore (remember that), customer service centre.

The agent asked Dad to confirm his phone number.

He did not know his phone number.

So I had to say his number out loud to him so that he could repeat it into the phone so the company could verify he was who he claimed to be.

Then they asked him to confirm his email address.

He also did not know that.

So I had to log into my own email account to figure out what his email address actually was because neither he nor I have used it since before the turn of the millennium.

I then recited the address aloud to him like a hostage negotiator coaching someone through a ransom demand.

He repeated it into the phone five separate times while the agent continued misunderstanding him and he continued misunderstanding the agent (did I mention it was an “offshore” customer service centre? #letthereaderunderstand).

It was at this point that I began to lose the will to live.

Eventually, we succeeded.

But no.

Now we had to VERIFY the email address.

So we turned on their ancient computer and prayed the internet was functioning long enough for the verification email to arrive.

Miraculously, it did.

Impersonating a digital Agatha Christie, I inspected the email for phishing attempts, confirmed it was legitimate, clicked the verification link, and at last the account was verified.

The agent then asked my father whether he gave his permission for me to speak on his behalf.

“Yes,” Dad said.

I took the phone and retreated to an empty room to investigate the actual problem.

But remember: I was still using my mother’s phone.

What I haven’t yet told you is that my mother wears Bluetooth hearing aids.

So suddenly the call began transferring itself directly into her ears from the other room.

I could no longer hear the agent.

The agent could no longer hear me.

My mother could hear the agent perfectly but had absolutely no idea how to stop hearing him.

Eventually, in a deeply symbolic move, she ripped the hearing aids from her ears and powered them off entirely.

After this, the television volume in the next room—now required to compensate for the loss of hearing aids—was raised to levels detectable by low-flying aircraft.

I returned to my attempt to determine the nature of the issue.

Turns out the agent had not called because they had identified a fault.

No.

He was calling about some equipment upgrade they were apparently meant to organise months ago but, well, hadn’t.

Right.

So I booked the appointment to get said equipment so upgraded.

Or at least, I tried to.

Because, naturally, he now needed verbal confirmation from my father again before finalising the booking.

So I marched back into the television apocalypse, held the phone out toward Dad, and instructed him to say “yes” when prompted like we were filming a proof-of-life video.

He complied.

Appointment booked for two weeks from now.

At this point, I gently explained that while future upgrades were lovely and aspirational, our more immediate concern was that the very much un-upgraded internet was currently less reliable than my father’s recollection of his own email address.

The agent hummed thoughtfully for a while and eventually transferred me to technical support.

I then spent 20 minutes on hold listening to music specifically engineered to drive me mad.

Finally, a technical support agent answered.

I begged her not to make us repeat the verification process. Mercifully, she agreed.

I explained the issue.

She placed me on hold for another ten minutes.

When she returned, she informed me that the wired connection was down and the modem was relying on an unstable 4G backup. This was despite the fact that the outage checker I had been regularly checking in with over the past 24 hours had repeatedly assured me there was no outage whatsoever at the address.

The solution?

Another technician appointment.

Of course.

She then placed me on hold for another five minutes while attempting to make the booking.

I was now gently rocking in the corner.

She returned to explain that she was receiving an error in the booking process and didn’t know why.

Back on hold.

Five more minutes.

Then she returned again to tell me she had been personally defeated by the error message and asked whether she could call me back later after figuring it out.

I told her to do whatever seemed right in her own eyes.

We hung up.

I stood silently in the empty room for five minutes staring into nothingness and mourning the irretrievable loss of one hour of my finite earthly existence.

Naturally, I assumed I would never hear from her again.

But astonishingly, she DID call back thirty minutes later to confirm the technician appointment. I happened to be cry-laughing to this video at the time (language warning).

Today is Friday. The appointment was booked for Monday.

Apparently, technicians lose their ability to technic on weekends.

Anyway.

That’s the end of the story.

At least until tomorrow, when my parents accidentally sign themselves out of Netflix, and my mental health collapses once again.