Today, for the third time in a week, I came home and my son told me the "Internet is down." I checked and just like all the other times, I actually could ping the Comcast gateway and so I knew the Internet wasn't "down." What's actually going on, however, is that the DNS isn't working for some reason. For the third time I called Comcast. Not so much because I have to, but because I like to. They're actually fairly helpful (if pedantic) and polite. Besides I still have 50,000 shares of ATHOME stock for which I need to get my money's worth somehow.

It turns out that they solve the problem, but I still haven't figured out why what we do solves the problem since we've done something different each time I called. The lesson for enterprise computing is that while Comcast's customer support is fulfilling the mission of getting me back online, they're not solving the real problem and so they keep getting called. They never get to the point where they discover I can ping their gateway. Another interesting fact, they don't seem to know I called just a few days ago. If they do, they're playing dumb. That's cool, because so am I. :-)