As submitted to http://acanac.org/blogs/geek/

If you read the part one to this story, you would know that my Bell telephone service stopped working last night at about 9pm.  At the time that part one was completed, the phone service still had not been restored.  My anger continued to grow for some time.  At approximately 12:30 am (3.5 hours later), I heard my telephone make a noise.  It would seem that the line came back.  I checked it this morning again and all seemed good and clear.

Not wanting to have a ridiculous charge bestowed upon me for a technician to show up to a working line, I called Bell again this morning to cancel the call.  It started out as expected with Emily answering the call and seemingly delighted to hear from me.  We exchanged the usual pleasantries, although she seems to always offer the same pleasantries.  At the end of the small talk, she connected me to a repair technician (call centre agent).  I should point out that I had to wait another 20 minutes to actually get the agent on the line.

Another thick accent.  This is getting a little bit ridiculous.  After some trying, I manage to convince her that I am interested in cancelling my repair call.  When she finally figured it out, she was more than happy to help me.  I felt good knowing that I had taken care of that.

Approximately 30 minutes later, at 8:45am, my personal cell phone began to ring.  I answered it.  Surprised?  It was a real live Bell technician.  He was questioning me about my cancelled repair call.  He told me that he felt uncomfortable  cancelling the call because he had run some sort of test on my line and detected a short.  Fair enough.  I expected the Bell repair people to show up on Thursday.  At about 11:30am I detected that  I could no longer access anything from my home remotely.  I could only speculate as to the cause.

When I arrived home after work, I checked the mailbox to discover that Bell had been by my house and that they had replaced a line outside.  That was great news.  I wasn't crazy, it was their problem.  Then I did the next most logical thing and went downstairs to check my email.  I discovered that my Internet wasn't working.  I checked the router and it showed that it was connected, but nothing would work.  I rebooted the router, the modem and my systems to no avail, the Internet would not come back up.

Eventually I gave in and called Acanac tech support.  I found the agent to be incredibly unprofessional and at times I found it hard to believe I had called a company at all.  It sounded much like I had called someone at their home.  She had me change some settings and try a few things.  Still no dice.  Eventually I gave into the repair call.

A few minutes after hanging up the phone, I got the idea to hard reset the modem.  Stuck a pin in the little hole on the back, reset it and reinitialized my setup.  ShaBAM.  It came back up.  I immediately called Acanac tech support and cancelled the repair call.  All is well again, balance has been restored to the force.