Loose cables

"The cable fell off". I had been asking the person at the other end of the line to hook his computer directly to the Comcast modem, so I naturally assumed he meant the CAT-5 cable. I asked if the locking tab was broken off the end.

"I don't think this has a locking tab", he said.

Oh, sure. "It's supposed to", I explained. "It keeps it from falling out."

"I don't see why it would fall off normally", he insisted.

I suppose I should have caught on to the "fall off" part, but I didn't. "Well, maybe we can tape it for now until we can get you a new cable", I suggested.

"Naw", he said, "I'll just tighten it up."

Huh?

"Oh, sheesh: you mean the coax cable fell off - the one that has a pin in the middle and screws on? That cable fell off?"

Ayup. That's just what he meant.

Actually, this knowledge pleased me a little. We had been chasing strange problems out here for several weeks and getting nowhere. Regularly they would have to power cycle this modem over and over before it would cough up a DHCP address for the router. As it was all just black magic to the folks near the modem, the 7:00 AM calls were getting a little tiresome to me. I don't say annoying: their problem was real and needed fixing, but it was annoying because it was getting worse rather than better.

We'd also had a slowly dying Windows 98 box that couldn't hold its private DHCP allocated address, so that puppy usually had to be powered off every morning before it would wheeze and clunk itself to life. The inability of that machine to work sometimes triggered them to try resetting the modem. I couldn't make them understand that if other machines could reach the Internet there was nothing wrong with the router or the modem: it was that stupid old machine. I was very pleased to hear that one recent morning it had given up the struggle to boot and no amount of rest would resuscitate it. One less problem for me, I thought.

But this falling off cable was really of interest. If the darn thing was so loose that it could actually fall off from handling, that might be the source of my other problems. It certainly couldn't have been helping.

"She's up now", my contact announced. "We have Internet".

That's good. Maybe they'll still have it tomorrow morning, but if not, well, I'm always up early anyway.

Take Control of Maintaining Your Mac

Take Control of Syncing Data in Snow Leopard

Take Control of Upgrading to Snow Leopard

Macworld Total Snow Leopard Superguide

Jump to Comments

Many of the products and books I review are things I purchased for my own use. Some were given to me specifically for the purpose of reviewing them. I resell or can earn commissions from the sale of some of these items. Links within these pages may be affiliate links that pay me for referring you to them. That's mostly insignificant amounts of money; whenever it is not I have made my relationship plain. I also may own stock in companies mentioned here. If you have any question, please do feel free to contact me.

Specific links that take you to pages that allow you to purchase the item I reviewed are very likely to pay me a commission. Many of the books I review were given to me by the publishers specifically for the purpose of writing a review. These gifts and referral fees do not affect my opinions; I often give bad reviews anyway.

We use Google third-party advertising companies to serve ads when you visit our website. These companies may use information (not including your name, address, email address, or telephone number) about your visits to this and other websites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you. If you would like more information about this practice and to know your choices about not having this information used by these companies, click here.