If I knew to whom

I made a major mistake yesterday and today I don't know to whom to apologize.

The DSL connection at home went down sometime on Friday afternoon. My brother-in-law called PLDT to see if there was a problem and they said they didn't know of any. They said we should wait a day or two to see if the problem would fix itself. I thought this was incompetent. I still do. But I can see why PLDT does it. They are trying to keep costs down.

So we waited two days. Closer to three, actually. I was busy with timmy, and going out with sol and friends (and timmy). So I ignored the fact that the internet was down ON A WEEKEND. Last night though, Sunday, I called PLDT DSL technical support and gave the call center person a piece of my mind. I told her (all of this is true) that clearly there was a problem with the modem since, when I connect to it directly with a LAN cable, it won't reply to pings except for about 5 seconds, right after a reset (pressing the reset button with a screwdriver for 7 seconds after turning it on).

The modem is supposed to be configurable with a web browser. I tried that, and also ping, and it just wasn't replying at all.

So I told the DSL person to send some technician over with a spare modem because clearly the modem was bad.

Well, the technician came over today and he reported that the modem goes online (I haven't gotten around to testing if it replies to pings) and the problem was that the phone cables had gotten discombobulated. I don't know who touched the phone cable Y connector, but apparently it was enough to kill the DSL signal even though the phone still worked for voice calls.

That'll teach me. Jerry Pournelle formulated Pournelle's law, stating that

Cables do matter. When something doesn't work, always check the cables and their connectors first.

I've said that before, elsewhere. But apparently, I haven't said it here yet. Now I have. When something doesn't work, check the cables first. This is a special case of the first law of debugging, "It's your bug". Don't look at other causes of the bug, first look at your own code or other things YOU've done that might have caused it.