This morning, my internet connection went into the basket.

After I finished a must-do task, I called tech support for my cable provider. The support person was excellent: she was knowledgeable, competent, and friendly, being willing to chat while waiting for screen refreshes and the like. Within ten minutes, working together, we had narrowed the problem to something to do with my router (I took it from there--it turned out that the cable from the router to the modem was terminally ill).

I hope the call was recorded to monitor call quality, because I commended her profusely at the end.

One bit of the conversation gave me a kick.

I jacked my laptop directly into the ethernet port on the modem.

"Okay," said I, "I'm going to reboot this puppy so it starts clean."

"Good idea," said she.

"It's only going to take about a minute and a half."

"Oh," she said, "You must be using Linux."

Haha nice.

That was better than most tech support calls, and you better not mention using Linux at all. If anything I may say I'm using using a Mac instead or sometimes Windows.

That makes a welcome change. ISP "tech support" people over here in the UK (well actually they're usually sitting in call centres in New Delhi) either haven't heard of Linux or won't support it...

I had mentioned earlier in the call that both the Windows and the Linux computers had the same symptoms. It didn't seem to make no never mind to her.

She deduced that I was using a Linux box for testing from the quick reboot time.

I said, she knew her stuff.

I made a point of complimenting her at the end.

Odd, it says you use Debian and CentOS, not puppy.

What's odd about that?

So many distros, so little time.

That's extremely rare. My tech support experiences were nowhere near as good. I had to hide very well the fact that I'm using Linux. Some were able to deduce it and then they said "I'm sorry but we don't support Linux", and they just hung up.

I haven't had to contact them yet, but plusnet "tech support" are UK based. In Yorkshire, but I won't hold that against them.