"The" Internet Connection

Getting the internet connection once the phone line was in place, wasn't that big of a pain.

You must be thinking that if we did get Internet connection easily, then why do I need to write a chapter on this one.
Picture abhi baaki hai mere Dost!!

About 1 week after we got connected to the world wide web, we were out of the web suddenly one afternoon.I tried everything I could like restarting the modem, laptop, etc. but no luck

My husband was busy the entire day in meetings and I could not get the customer care number from him. He tried his skills but only to find out that someone may have hacked our account because the username had changed to 'multiplay'. He called them up in the evening and the customer care guys helped him through. They made him go through a lot of edit, edit, delete, save steps and finally our internet was up. Also, he was told that the system switched to username 'multiplay' sometimes when it is not working properly but we don't need to worry about that.
We had a sigh of relief!

Now, this episode turned to be a every day soap and that too a melodramatic one. My husband had to attend to conference calls from home every night and he had no connectivity to the internet.
We were calling the customer care practically everyday.
One good agent told us that our modem had some physical problem and we need to get it replaced.
Now, starts the saga of going to telephone exchange to get the modem replaced.
To cut the long story short, here are a few painful things that happened-
1) The internet floor of the exchange is a haunted house as soon as you get out from the lift. No Human, No furniture, absolutely nothing.
2) I found a door and it looked like a residential floor because there were lots of clothes drying in the passage, there were women screaming in kannada, there was some really bad odour(I almost puked), and there were some tulsi, money plant pots in the passage.
3) I knocked on one of the doors to discover that I was on the right floor and I just need to walk past the clothes, dog, smell, pots, and public.
4) It was about 10:30 am and there was no officer present. Only an old maid brooming the floor, couple of Babus chit-chatting, a few victims like me, and various christ, Laxmi, Shiva, pictures.
5) The staff came at about 10:50 am and then started the act of 'my problem first'. The staff was well prepared for this and they started to point fingers at each other making the consumers go from one desk to the other.
6)I finally got my modem replaced with a used and dirty one-loaded with cob webs. I cleaned it with my dupatta and was directed to another babu to get it configured
He tried to bounce me over to other desks but I was too smart for that by now.
7)The babu had to configure it with his laptop and the laptop had no life
8)The cord of the laptop was missing!!!!
9)He found the cord and charged his lappie. Pretty cool na?
10) He configured my modem....phew!

And after 4 days, I was at the exchange again. This time repeating steps 4-10 this time.
And again after 2 days.
And after about 8 days, the gentleman who had configured the modem, was standing at our doorstep smiling.
I was a little inhibited to be honest.
"Hello Madam, how is your internet now? seems like you are still having problems."
I was even more inhibited now because this time the internet was perfectly fine and we had filed no complaints for the last 9 days.
I dont know if he was their to collect tip(he didnt look that types though but neither do other government officials) or if our first complaint reached his desk now.

Whatever the case may be, but our internet is fine now and

And we are an expert now on how to fix the connection in case there is a problem.
India teaches you so many things. Your neighbor's phone number, fixing the internet and I still crib about India. bad of me!