My Wife, the Tech support agent...

As many of you know, my wife currently works for Virgin Media as a tech support monkey, much like I did back in the day. Every day, she's tasked with fixing people's broadband, both the wired and wireless kind.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I came home today to find that we have no internet access.
"I think the router has had it" she says. "I've tried rebooting but it wont come back. I can't even log into it". A travesty, if ever I heard one! This happened when she decided to reset it yesterday, for an unrelated reason.

Naturally, I decided to take a stab at fixing it; I am the man after all. I rebooted it - no joy. I reboot the modem - still no joy. I then turn the modem off and have just the router on - now I can log in, but obviously without internet access. I switch the modem back on - still no internet after several minutes. I try resetting the router - something I didn't really want to do as I've got a lot set up on it (like port forwarding) that will require some rejiggery. Still nothing.

It's looking pretty gloomy at this point, but before giving in, it's always worth going over the basics again. We've already rebooted to no avail, so what's next -  checking the cables. I had a look at the router and asked my wife "So when you reset this before, did you plug the cables back in correctly?". Immedialy she snaps back "Of course I did! The only cable I unplugged went back into the same place it came out of, on the far right".

This is interesting because the cable she's referring to actually plugs into the far left port, not the far right port. To confuse matters further, she hadn't plugged it into either, instead she opted for a port slap bang in the middle of it.

Keep in mind that we were looking at it from the front, so left and right are reversed.

"Are you sure?" I ask. "Yes, of course I'm bloody sure!" she replies, by now getting slightly irate at me questioning her ability to do at home the same thing she gets tens of people to do every day at work. "Take a look" I say, gesturing towards the router. The room falls silent. "Oh....." Yes, "Oh!" indeed!

A few minutes later, with the cables in their correct position, we were back online. The scary thing? She's one of the better agents Virgin has.
I probably should have checked the cables before resetting my router. It's almost ironic that I made the critical error of trusting my wife less than 2 days before our first anniversary.

Still, piss-poor troubleshooting skills aside, I wouldn't change her for anything (or anyone!). Love you, baby!