The Adventure of a Layman and the Purchase of An Internet Wireless Router Part 3: Finally the Home Network Specialist

I confess that my first choice for a network technician was my daughter’s friend H.  He was unavailable for the first run but after the late night drama I called him early in the morning and asked “Tell me, are you very very good at network?”

“Yes!  I would say so,” he replied without any effort at false modesty.

“Tell you what, because you were unavailable I asked a friend to help me but we are having some problems.  Could you come up and look at it for me this morning?”

“Noon would be better.”

To be fair to C, I called him as well to let him know that as of Friday I now had another technician with himself on the job, and if between the two of them thy cant get a simple wireless network up and running by the end of the day I would have to call the service provider, Flow.  C remonstrated that he was an observer of the 7^th day Sabbath so he could not be able to do much n Friday.  Remember he was scheduled to return by Sunday morning.  So I told C that if the other fellow fixed the error I would still pay him for his time.

It was back to school season all around.  And at 3:30 I was still in a ling queue at Bill Express just to pay a school fee my son.    So when I finally picked up H it was 4:30 when all good Sabbath keepers wee thinking of winding down on everything secular.

When we arrived at my home a last minute customer distracted me form H’s activities for about 20 minutes.  By the time I rejoined him he announced that he had fixed the problem.  Sure enough two devices were browsing quite fine. 

“I knew what was causing the problem before I came,“  he admitted.

And he went on to explain that with two routers of the same brand it was only to be expected that they would assign similar IP addresses to separate computers, so he simply turned off the ability of one to assign IP address so it was simply acting as a wireless switch.

So C had diagnosed the problem after all.  He just had not figured out the simple solution.   No doubt those weary-eyed midnight investigations were getting warm.   But at the end of the day,  H was a network specialist who had come across this problem before.