Flawed Nutcracker

— Ashesh Maharjan
https://amaharjan.wordpress.com/ 

Here is one good way to get an internet connection.  You go to the internet head office once a day for a week or two just to get them ready to set up a router or switch or what ever so. They agree to install not because they think they should, but because you don’t seem to give up trying and they are sick of seeing your face on a regular basis. Then you wait for a month without any signs of connection. (That’s the length of time between two full moons.) The cause? Only god knows. In fact you don’t wait. You call the office every single day for twenty days and technicians come every other day to take an endeavor to make it work. Each time they come, they have an excuse for failure. Someday they don’t have a clamper (an instrument used to staple the head of a RJ-45 cable, which looks like a nutcracker), other days they don’t bring a ladder or they simply can’t tell where the problem is.

After twenty days of futile effort, they decide that they are a little more than dubious about the 83 meters of ethernet cable which connects the switch on the electricity pole to your computer. Which means, an extra charge of Rs.83X20 if you had paid for this faulty cable, fortunately you hadn’t. You had decided not to pay a dime until you are assured of the connectivity, which was an apt thing to do.

Now this is where things get really freaky. You call the office to say how peeved you feel at what is going on. And instead of being sorry, the man on the other side literally yells at you for not paying the dues. He wants you to pay rite away if you want the cable replaced. But he wouldn’t say anything more than ‘it seems to be the only problem, can’t you see?’ when you ask if he was certain that the new cable will work. You hang up confused and enraged.

After ten days or so when you call the office to check if anything was going on, they send the same old fellows over. This time it takes them no more than a few minutes to fix up the connection. Flabbergasted by what you’ve witnessed, you ask the man to explain. And all he says is ‘It was the damn clamper. We were using a shitty clamper last month.’ Then you forgive them for wasting your month, for not treating you well enough, for being careless, for wasting your telephone calls, for still not being sorry. Finally, you hope that your little tale ends up happy. But you are still disgruntled, for the speed of internet connection you get can only be called glacial. You have already paid and you are helpless now.

Well, I’m confident that by now you have learnt that this is not a good way to get an internet connection. Now, the part that you might not know is that this is an anecdote of mine, which I thought deserves to be written. So, all the ‘you’ in the story are in fact ‘me’. And the moral of the story? It is that the thing that looks like a nutcracker is actually a clamper, and it can sometimes be a pain in the neck. And that ‘sometimes’ is more frequent than we imagine.