That’s how to spell assume, isn’t it?

We’ve all seen/experienced/created/fixed situations like this one. One of my small office customers, one I am very fond of, called me late Tuesday afternoon to report their Internet connection was down. I walked one of them through logging into the Netopia Router (don’t cringe, it was a user login, not an admin login), to simply check status. They told me the WAN status was “Waiting for DSL”, which I assumed meant there was a service issue with SBC. I had them power cycle the router, which didn’t seem to help at all.

So I logged the call with SBC DSL support, they did some testing, and they couldn’t really tell what was going on. So I convinced them to schedule a line engineer to come out, which was supposed to be today (Thursday, June 30th). I came by the office myself to see if there was anything else I could check out. Lo and behold, I saw the DSL line had been yanked out of the phone jack, and the splitter the line was connected to was smashed open. Um, yeah, that would be the cause of the Internet outage.

So what’s my point? It’s this: I had ass-u-me-d that since this office was full of PhDs, MBAs, and other various bright and highly educated folks, they would have checked that right away. Nope. One of them said they checked some cables, but I’m guessing they were looking at the LAN ports on the DSL router and didn’t trace back the cable coming out of the DSL port.

So yes, I am kicking myself, because even I made the gross error of not asking them to check that most critical of cables. In my head, I may have been thinking “PEBKAC,” but I didn’t utter the words “did ya check the DSL line?” I almost always ask my clients this when they tell me about lost Internet connectivity (because more often than not, it IS the cause). But I didn’t this time. And other people in the office assumed that the “other guy” had checked the DSL line.

Really, it was only one full day of lost work time, and there were no hard feelings, just a few good chuckles. Everybody is the wiser.