Modems And The Day Of The Triffids

Note: the following article was originally written, for a personal blog I used to run, on 17 January 2012, and it has been brought up-to-date and edited for this site.

You’re probably wondering what the hell modems have to do with the John Wyndham book, “The Day Of The Triffids”, right?

Hopefully, all will become clear soon, but first, a brief summary of this classic science fiction book, for those who’ve not read it (or seen a movie or TV adaptation of it).

The book is basically about two things – triffids, which are plants that can move about, are intelligent, and can kill people with poisonous stings, and a meteor shower that renders all those who watch it blind.

Both of these elements are, of course, bad, but what makes the situation so horrible is that they both happen at once – the vast majority of the population go blind, and therefore can’t see where they’re going or what they’re doing, and the triffids go on the rampage, attacking these blind and defenceless humans everywhere.

The point, to me at least, which was borne out from my many years working in IT, is that while you can plan for independent scenarios, it’s really difficult to plan for combinations of events, particularly rare or unexpected ones, such as those depicted in this novel.

And that sort of brings me to our modem issues.

We had been struggling for years with a so-called broadband/DSL service that barely offered 1 Mbps downloads, in spite of frequently asking for the 3 Mbps service that we’d been offered.

And then, one weekend in December 2011, we had an Internet outage that lasted longer than usual, so we raised a support ticket.

Needless to say, by the time the service engineer came, we’d already got our Internet access back.

Nonetheless, he checked the line into our house and reported that all was OK, and he gave us a new modem to install, saying it was all pre-configured, so all we had to do was plug it in.

A chance comment by me about our Internet speed led him to ringing his office and finally upgrading us to a 3 meg service.

Hurray, or so we thought!

However, from the moment we installed the new modem, we had no end of technical issues, including loss of Internet connectivity, an inability to access our local home network, and sometimes we couldn’t even connect to the modem’s own control panel.

These problems were occurring multiple times a day, every single day, which meant getting any work done was difficult, to say the least.

The only good news was that, when we could get access to the Internet, our download speed was vastly improved, at last – although 3 meg is still nothing to write home about!

After trying everything we could think of, we called our service provider again and waited for the engineer to come.

Once again, he checked the line into the house and found no problems, but we did find a phone terminal in our mudroom where the wires were a bit loose, so he tightened those up.

Did that do the trick?

No, of course not – that would have been far too easy!

So, I mapped out our phone and Internet wiring set-up for him, as he wouldn’t come in the house for some reason, and we decided to try making a small change to the configuration, as he’d discovered, based on our modem stats, that there was way too much noise on our line, and that the incoming signal was therefore being compromised.

Back indoors, I swapped a few cables around and installed a new junction box, and lo and behold, the noise on the line disappeared.

We thought we’d cracked it, so the engineer left again.

It should come as no surprise that the problems were still with us – not as severe as before, but things weren’t right.

More out of desperation than anything else, I thought I’d try shutting down my software firewall – mainly because I’d run out of options. I didn’t like the idea – after all, we’d installed the firewall for a reason – but we were losing hours and hours every day to these intermittent outages.

And much to our delight, that solved the problem! No more dropped connections to the Internet or to our home network, no random glitches – just a working network and Internet connection!

Finally, we have a reasonable service, although I use the word “reasonable” loosely – we were still struggling with a 3 Mbps service when I knew people who were getting 60 Mbps (even back in 2012)!

But that’s what you get when you live in a remote, rural area, with no choices of any utility providers, I suppose, and at least we don’t have to rely on a patchy satellite service.

So, now do you see the connection to the Triffids story?

Just like in that book, our problems were not caused by one single factor, nor even two, but by three different issues, all of which were causing us excessive downtime.

Fixing any one or two of those problems was still insufficient, and that’s why it’s really hard to test and plan for such combinations of occurrences.

With hindsight, I think it also shows the importance (sometimes, as least), of providing people with full information.

If I hadn’t mentioned the slow download speeds, the engineer wouldn’t have managed to get us the upgrade to the better connection.

I accept that, on occasion, you can give people too much information (i.e. more than they need to know) and that that information can be used against you, but I’ve almost always been one to tell people as much as I can, because you have no idea what will be useful when it comes to solving a problem and what won’t.

I sometimes see questions from people suffering from depression who are asking about what they should tell their medical professional (e.g. psychiatrist, psychologist, doctor) when they go for therapy, and my answer is always the same – as much as you can!

If they don’t have all the facts (including feelings and events and experiences), then how can they decide on the most appropriate treatment for your depression (or any other mental health problem for that matter)?

Clearly, you cannot give anybody your entire life history, but there is no point holding anything back if you think it might even be the tiniest bit relevant.

So to me, it’s better to be as open and honest as you can, and overshare rather than undershare – they can assess what is important and what is not.