About the only time I deviate from fun puzzles and logical discussions is when something so egregious happens that the urge to rant overcomes my thin layer of civilization. Today’s rant can be partially forgiven because at the heart of it is a concern about logical thinking and actions.

The culprit is Time Warner again. How long has it been since I have complained about them? Maybe they are indeed improving since the time between shutdowns is increasing. To be fair, I do not think any ISP has taken on the responsibility of being a utility in the same sense as electricity, phones, or water. PBS recently featured an interview with a nice older woman who has never been violent in her 75 years on earth. She was driven to attack the phones at reception of her ISP with a hammer after the shameful treatment she received. “Do I have your attention now?” She kept shouting while pounding. Of course she was charged with an offense and found guilty. Google on “woman hammer phones arrest” to get a bunch of articles. Here is one.

This latest event from Time Warner does not rise to the level of Comcast’s treatment of its customers, but it sort of fits into the logical analysis postings because this failure challenges logic.

Last night when I got home from a job, my wife said that the Internet was down and had been down for several hours. That could mean most anything. So I checked the modem and sure enough, the Send and Receive lights were blinking in unison. I unplugged it and waited the canonical 30 seconds before powering it up again. The lights came on and, lo and behold, were normal. Then while I watched, they went out again and returned to the blinking. This was enough to convince me the problem was not at my end.

After ascertaining there was nothing on TV that I wanted to see, and making sure that I had at least an hour to spare, I dialed up the Time Warner number and waded through the selections. The sappy music was playing when I got a call on another line and eventually had to start over. This time when I navigated to the same place, I got… nothing! Did I make a mistake or had they neglected to pay their phone bill? Nothing to do but start over. This time I got the sappy music again, but since I stayed on the line longer, I was treated to a break in the music while a nice young lady tried to convince me to switch my phone service from the one I was successfully using to hear her talk to Time Warner where I was calling because they were not working. Whoever thought it would be a good idea to recruit new clients from disgruntled customers calling to report an outage must have been real sharp.

After 17 minutes, my call was answered by a helpful agent who was totally perplexed by the situation. After we established that I owned my own modem and that it had been working great for over a year and that I had not made any changes (in fact I was not even in the house when the system went down), he asked for the MAC address, make and model number. Then he put me on hold for maybe the third time while I played Spider. When he came back, he asked if it was up now. I looked at the modem in time to see the lights change from blinking to fully operational. Within seconds I confirmed that we were back online.

“What was the problem?” I asked without malice. “It appears that we did some system upgrades and your MAC number was re-entered incorrectly.” Think about that answer for a moment and all that it implies. At the very least something had happened at Time Warner that required a human to look at a hard copy of accounts (I assume my case is not unique) and manually re-enter complicated numbers. No wonder some of them were wrong.

The thought that a utility would have that kind of non-fail/safe system is astounding. The fact that they did not know they had screwed up before I called is even more puzzling. But what drove them a manual re-entry in the first place? That is a mystery I would probably rather not solve.

As a final note, when I told my wife that we were back online and explained what had happened, she admitted she had tried to call earlier to see if she could fix it herself, but she got tired of listening to the sappy music and left it to me because she knows I am more patient. There is a lesson in here, but I am not sure what it is.

In response to the interest my original tutorial generated, I have completely rewritten and expanded it. Check out the tutorial availability through Lockergnome. The new version is over 100 pages long with chapters that alternate between discussion of the theoretical aspects and puzzles just for the fun of it. Puzzle lovers will be glad to know that I included an answers section that includes discussions as to why the answer is correct and how it was obtained. Most of the material has appeared in these columns, but some is new. Most of the discussions are expanded compared to what they were in the original column format.