Spotterwub

by ComputerBob

October 25, 1999

Last Updated January 30, 2001

My house is out in the boondocks, about 20 miles from a medium-sized city, so I don't expect my phone lines to be of the highest quality. I usually don't have any problems at all making regular phone calls, but connecting to the Internet via modem has been a wild ride for the past few years. Sometimes, there's so much static on the phone line that I can't connect at all. Other times, I can connect, but only at 16,000 or 21,000 bits per second, and then I get disconnected a few minutes later. When the moon is in the seventh house, and Jupiter aligns with Mars, then peace guides the planets, and I can connect to the Internet at 28,000 or sometimes even at 38,000. At all other times, it's always been a gamble whether or not I'll be able to answer an email message or publish my Web site before I get disconnected again.

The problem is, I've never known when I'd be able to connect at a fast speed, when I'd be disconnected, and when I wouldn't be able to connect at all. It has always seemed to have something to do with the weather, or at least the humidity, but not enough for me to be able to figure out exactly what was causing it.

Well, push finally came to shove a few days ago. After at least 2 weeks of nothing but sporadic connections, disconnections, slow connections, and no connections at all, I finally called U.S. West, to have them check my phone line. The last time I did that was about 2 years ago. A phone guy came out, went up a ladder, did some checking and told me that one of my neighbors' cordless phones was "bleeding battery noise" onto my phone line. The phone guy switched my telephone to a different set of wires and the problems went away for awhile.

I fully expected that the same thing would happen when I called U.S. West this time. Instead, they did an "electronic check" of my phone line within an hour of my call, without ever coming out to my house. Then they called me back and told me that there was nothing wrong with my line. A few minutes later, I tried connecting to the Internet, and was very pleasantly surprised to immediately connect at 41,333 -- faster than I had ever connected before. My elation ended that evening, however, when I was unable to connect at any speed at all for more than 3 hours.

At midnight that night, I called U.S. West's 24-hour repair service and explained the problem to them all over again. That time, they assured me that they would actually send someone out to my house 4 days later, to check out my phone line in person.

This morning at 8:45, a phone guy appeared at my door. He came in the house, plugged a bulky phone-looking contraption into my house's main phone connection, and listened for about 30 seconds. Then, he told me that there's nothing wrong with my phone line.

I asked him to watch while I tried to connect to the Internet. He followed me to my office. I tried to dial into my Internet Service Provider 3 or 4 times, but was unable to connect at any speed.

The phone guy knowingly suggested that maybe the problem was my PC. He carefully explained to me that "sometimes, you get too much stuff on a computer and it slows down your modem." I teach computer courses, so I know that having "too much stuff on your computer" doesn't affect your modem speed at all. I wanted to scream. After all the trouble I'd been through with my Internet connection, U.S. West had finally sent me a repair guy -- one who knew absolutely nothing about computers, but who was more than willing to pretend like he did. I bit my tongue and diplomatically explained to him that my PC has 96 MB of RAM memory and 26 GB of hard drive space. He then asked me what type of processor my PC has, obviously hoping that I wouldn't know, so that he could then blame my connection problems on my PC's processor and be on his way. I told him that my PC has a Pentium II, running at 266 Megahertz -- way more speed than what would be needed to run a modem.

I went on to explain to him that I had recently upgraded my PC to Windows 98 and had also replaced its modem, all with no effect on my Internet connection problems.

That's when he suggested that I might want to change my phone number, just in case the problem was caused by bad switches in the phone company's main offices.

At that point, I realized that I was dealing with a guy who had no idea what to do -- a guy who was quickly becoming more and more desperate to avoid having to figure out what to do. If I wanted him to do anything to help me, I was going to have to take control of the situation.

So, I suggested that, since the problem seemed to be related to the weather, he might want to go up his ladder and shake the phone wire that goes from the telephone pole in the corner of my yard to my house, while I listened to the dial tone on my cordless phone. That way, we could see if that wire might have a bad connection in it, or was somehow allowing rain and dew to get into the wire. He agreed, and a few minutes later, he was at the top of his ladder, while I stood on my front porch, cordless phone in hand.

He reached up and touched an area of the phone line with some sort of screwdriver tool and the phone in my hand immediately started crackling loudly. A second later, he shouted, "I think I found your problem!"

I shouted back, asking him what he had found.

"Spotterwub on a bunch of the ports!", came his reply.

I asked again. Same answer.

I took a couple of steps closer to him and asked a third time. He said it again: "spotterwub."

I watched from a distance as he cut my phone line, put a new connector on it, reconnected it, and tightened everything up. Twenty minutes later, he came down the ladder and was back in the house.

I was embarrassed to have to ask him again, but I did it anyway. That time, I finally deciphered his message: a giant spider web had been connecting several of the phone wires up on the telephone pole. Every time that spider web had gotten wet, from dew or from rain, it had shorted out those wires, causing the static that had messed up my Internet connections!

He grinned. "Let's try connecting now!"

We went downstairs to my office and immediately connected to the Internet at 41,333. He left, happy that he had solved the problem. As I write this, it has been about 8 hours since the phone guy left. I've connected to the Internet several times -- once at 28,880, several times at 41,333, and once at 44,000! And so far, I haven't been disconnected at all. I sure hope that's the last I see of my Internet connection problems.

Looking back, I guess I should have known all along what had been causing those problems.

After all, I do spend several hours a day on the Worldwide Web.