Magus without internet for days. Hilarity does not ensue.

[Magus]

If you were thinking, "Hey! Magus hasn't posted in a while. I hope he's gone for good." prepare to be very disappointed. No, I haven't left, I just haven't been able to get on for a while because my Internet has been down. But please, allow me to elaborate...

For the past week or so, I've been having trouble doing online stuff. I would have to refresh a page multiple times before it would finally load, and sometimes it would just time out completely. After this went on for more than a couple days, I decided to ask around only to find out that everybody was having this problem.

My mom decided to call our ISP, Trificient, to see what was going on. Well, apparently they have no idea. The company is in complete chaos, hundreds of people are down, and they are on the brink of going out of business.

But it gets even more interesting.

They call back a day or so later and say they have "launched an investigation" and that they traced the root of the problem back to my house. They claim to have detected an "unusual pattern of pings" coming from my router, but I tell them that's probably because I'm constantly downloading movies and stuff. In any case, they send somebody to my house to take my mom's computer away to be virus scanned.

After they return the computer, an employee asks me a lot of questions and basically says that they've had to "patch" hundreds of customers' machines and it's costing them a fortune. He's really nice about it, though. He even installs a free trial version of Avast and Spybot, and says that when the trial runs out, just contact him and Trificient will pay for the full versions.

After the guy leaves, Trificient has to reboot everything. They discover that one of their towers doesn't work very well, and so my Internet connection is still screwy. But hopefully it will be fixed soon.

Oh yeah, and sometime during all of this, my mom had talked to a manager on the phone. Because I've caused them so many problems before, they start talking about me. I don't know what they say, but somehow the manager guy gets impressed and asks if I need a job. He says they need all the help they can get. I say "sure" and now I have an interview next week.


TL;DR - My Internet connection goes down. The company is in chaos. I get free software and a job, and I didn't even have to do anything. Woohoo.

[RTF]

This is like that time I almost got committed to an insane asylum, but instead they just hired me and made me the boss.

[Zazen]

Holy shit is that an incompetent manager. Which means that's a pretty good entry-level job opportunity. You'll be in the enviable position of learning all kinds of crap by playing with their infrastructure and then blaming anything you break on obviously ridiculous causes like customer viruses. Score

[ApprenticePhreak]

Unless they're trying to pull something clever like study his behaviors and what he does while on the clock and then blame some shit strictly on him.

[JD716]

Why haven't i ever heard of Trificent? Is it just a local thing? Anyways, congrats on earning yourself an interview...

[Magus]

Why haven't i ever heard of Trificent? Is it just a local thing?

I think it's local, but I'm not sure how local. I know the southern part of Virginia and the northern part of North Carolina are covered, but I think that might be the limit.

http://trificient.net/

[Zazen]

Unless they're trying to pull something clever like study his behaviors and what he does while on the clock and then blame some shit strictly on him.

No way, I guarantee that they have zero accountability in that organization. Unusual pattern of pings, so they install a bunch of crap on a customers PC? This is surely what happened:

Management has little or no technical expertise, and so relies entirely on the technical staff. They're so technically illiterate that they can't tell when a member of the technical staff is full of crap. Management thinks that this is a good thing, because they're trusting the technical expertise of the staff and avoiding the dreaded micromanagement. After all, they're good at managing people and they're proud of their (confident, therefore highly skilled) technical team. A good manager doesn't get in the way of his staff.

A technical staff member is trying to determine the cause of the outage. He's not so skilled but he acts confident when reporting to management so that he seems like a valuable employee. He sees some pings that he doesn't understand and blames the problems on this because it's the only thing that is out of the ordinary. (It's probable that he doesn't ordinarily even look at whatever logs have the "unusual" activity, though. He's just looking now because there's a problem.) He declares that this is the problem confidently to management.

Someone from the technical staff confidently reports that the ping thing is the problem. Someone speculates that the pings are being caused by malware, a common default explanation for any unexplained computer behavior. Management makes the grand logical leap that if they can solve the malware problem, the network problems will go away. Any IT manager with half a brain would see that this is a symptom of poor network visibility and/or lack of controls. Even if the malware thing were true then the solution is to make the network able to handle it, not start providing extremely expensive anti-malware support to every single individual endpoint.

So Magus, do your best to get a job with this company. You will get to play with whatever cool stuff they have and add all of it to your resume without having to worry about pesky internal controls or getting in trouble for causing downtime. This is a real opportunity!