Adventures of a Traveling Transcriptionist

"Adventures in Tech Hell."

And by that, I mean that my side is the hell side, so don't feel sorry for the script monkeys in tech support. I wrote this back on March 25th, 2009, when I was on a business trip with my husband (his business trip, I was just along for the ride).

Here's my fun story for the week. As of tonight, I'm sitting in a hotel room in the Washington DC area, so server dude, if you look at my IP, it's not my normal one. I've been in this hotel since the 20th. While my husband has been attending his business conference during the days at the convention center across the street, I've been doing my job from my mobile setup in the hotel using the "free" high-speed access from LodgeNet, the service the hotel chain uses. Part of my job involves downloading and uploading files to a secure server at work. I have to do this a minimum of twice a day.

Day 1, I try to download my workload to see what I'll be working on Monday morning. What? Cannot access the ftp server. Try to do it through IE, Rumba and Firefox. None work. Get suspicious, but okay, my husband can log onto his work and going out from the firewall at his work, he can access my files and download them to a flash drive to move between his laptop and mine. So we're good there. But I still decide to call tech support on Monday and see what's going on.

Day 2 and Day 3 are spent between downtown DC and visiting the National Zoo (those pandas are pretty darn cute!).

Day 4, Monday. I try accessing ftp again. No luck. Call tech support. Get a woman who's either in India or from India as that's what her accent is. Who knows these days with outsourcing? Anyway, I explain what's going on and of course, the first thing out of her mouth is "can you browse okay?" Duh. Yes, I can browse, I can go all over the web. What I cannot do is ftp. I think she really did not know what ftp means so she had to bump me up a level in support.

Next level, we go through the same thing. You can tell they're looking at their script on their monitor and following all the steps, but they aren't getting what I'm saying. I tell the guy point blank that my guess is that your sysadmin is blocking port 21 and won't let me through the stupid firewall to do ftp. After all, we can't have people doing that as they might :::gasp::: download illegal files like porn or torrents (and I didn't say torrents 'cause I figured they wouldn't get that either) or mp3 files. You know, that peer-to-peer thing. Okay. I get that. But I'm logging into a secure server at work which I need to do for work.

I get bumped up another level. Finally I get a tech support person who gets what I'm saying. We go through all the stupid steps of checking my network connection, which is NOT the problem, but it makes them feel good and their little script says they must do that. He does something that fixes it, but he doesn't tell me what (obviously he opened the port so I could get through). Didn't tell me it was temporary and that if I closed my browser and shut down my computer, I wouldn't be able to get back in and I'd have to do it all over again.

I got my first set of files uploaded and thought it's good now.

Day 5, Tuesday. Go to download my files to work on for today, Wednesday. No ftp access. Have to get my husband to download for me again.

Day 6, Wednesday, today. I finish my files early and want to ftp them, but I have no access. I decide around lunchtime to harass tech support again. I call, go through the first level and they say they'll have someone call me back. I wait an hour and a half and no one calls. Well, I'm on my way out to go do a little sightseeing and won't be back until after dinner. I get back to the room and there's no messages on the phone. I call tech support AGAIN, go through the first level to the next level. Am getting impatient with this nonsense. I tell the guy that I have done everything they are going to ask me to do so don't even bother asking me again. Just open the stupid port and let me do my file transfer. But they still make me do it. Finally, the guy admits that the firewall is blocking ftp, which is what I said the first time I called and was assured that, oh, no, we don't block any ports. Like heck they don't.

So it's unblocked and he said it will stay that way for three days (I didn't tell him I'm checking out tomorrow and flying home).

Oh, yeah, and then I've been having problems with my outgoing emails, maybe some of my incoming ones, too. I think at first it must be Outlook, but I switch to using webmail and I'm still having problems. None of my test emails seem to be getting out. Finally, they start coming in. I examine the headers and find out that it's taking anywhere from 11 to 48 hours for my mail to make a circle and come back to me. I tell tech support this and they want to blame the ISP I have email with. I said, no, it's not their fault. I can read headers and I can tell you exactly where the mail is getting stuck and it's within THEIR system. It's ridiculous for mail to get stuck like that.

Don't you just hate it when you know more than the tech people and you have no degree in it, no formal training, just 20-plus years of computing experience?

The upshot in the future is that I will have to use a broadband card with my laptop when I am ftp'ing files because it is now confirmed that LodgeNet does indeed block that capability with their firewall and I am done talking to their idiot tech support.