Never lie to your customer service guy!

This guy shares how a customer kept lying about their internet and ended up almost losing a 100 bucks.

Check out the full story.

It was working before I left for vacation.

In the mid 2000’s I was working for a small WISP (Wireless Internet Service Provider) in a town with a Military base nearby.

This is where things started to cripple…

Part of our network extended over the base and either due to the owner’s setup or some signal from the base or maybe the fact we were using 2.4ghz we had a fair share of issues at times.

The owner was basically absent and working for another company about 2 hours away while going through a divorce.

I was left dealing with support issues, sales, setting up equipment for our installer, and some pc repair services. Anything network wise I couldn’t figure out the owner would remote in and deal with.

That sounds BAD!

Our network was based around static IP address sets where the tower was a .1 and any of our equipment was always an odd IP address and customer devices had an even IP address right next to it.

Everything was built on private IPv4 space though a few had static routed public IP’s as needed.

So one Monday fairly early in the work day I received a call from a customer about 20 miles from the office who was having a problem with his internet connection.

I pull up his account, find his IP pair and start poking around to see what was working.

UH OH…

I first started pinging the tower/sector his equipment was connecting to then added a ping to the CPE (Customer Presence Equipment) and finally his personal device IP address which in this case was a small router.

So the tower was working fine, no excess latency or drops and same for the CPE but the customers address was not responding at all.

I asked the customer a few questions and asked him to check the cabling and such from his end but as far as I could tell everything on my side was working.

He said It was all working on his end before he left on vacation and that no changes had been made so it must be on our end.

He knew he had to make things clear!

We went back and forth a few times and I told him I would be happy to come out and take a look directly but if it was his equipment at fault it would incur a service charge. He didn’t care for that idea and said he would check things again and call back later.

I left my my pings running and checked them throughout the day just in case the problem was intermittent and only his place was being affected at this point.

The customer called in again just after lunch and reiterated that his internet was still not working.

We talked about a time for me to come by and take a look and scheduled for around 4:00 that afternoon, then I could close up the office early and just head straight home since my place was a bit closer to him than the WISP office.

He still insisted the issue was not his equipment but understood it would be a charge if it wasn’t.

Finally things got under control!

About the time where I was closing up the office to head over and deal with the issue that particular customer had been having I received a phone call.

From him and he was quite contrite, he informed me that his internet was working now and I no longer needed to come over to look at it.

It seems that unbeknownst to him before leaving on vacation his wife had decided to unplug the router.

One of the earliest questions in the troubleshooting I always asked was if everything was plugged in and I also suggested rebooting the router.

Choosing to lie nearly cost him 100 bucks for some guy to take 30 seconds check the cables and plug it in.

GEEZ! That’s dramatic!

Wouldn’t it be easier if people accepted their mistakes and moved on?

Let’s find out what people on Reddit think about this one.

This user has a horrible ISP story!

This user has another story of a confused client!

This user also had a similar issue once upon a time!

This user knows why the customers need to unplug their devices.

This user knows you sometimes just have to trick people into doing things.

Someone’s a bit frustrated here!

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.