Tech isn’t my strong suit. My wife can analyse a computer system (at least I think that’s what a systems analyst does), and is in charge of resetting the clock on the boiler, while I typically handle the more… physical chores.
When our home broadband went out last month due to stroppy Eunice, which thanks to the miracle of broadband I now see was known as Storm Nora in Denmark and Storm Zeynep in Germany — Google translate tells me that means ‘Zeynep’ in English, which is a big help; reddit sent me on the right track, but honestly frak reddit for reasons I won’t get into here because I’ve already spent way too long between these dashes — we found ourselves in the hellscape of no streaming. Well, hellscape to me, somewhat less so for my wife, who for reasons which escape me is not a big Netflix consumer.
Zen, my ISP at the time, told me to go bug BT, who told me sorry but this is Zen’s affair. In the eye of this little storm were Openreach, who sit on a cloud of untouchability to mere mortals. After a few go-rounds I shouted Help! on a forum. Completely unexpectedly, this produced swift results. Soon we had a friendly Openreach guy in our living room, which isn’t my favourite place for strangers to be in the Covid hellscape that us immunocompromised volk continue to find ourselves. He quickly pronounced our router kaputt (“defekt und daher nicht mehr funktionierend”).
My guilt at this being one of those rare instances when the fault lay so close to home was assuaged by memories of Zen’s less than stellar customer service, which begins with the usual annoying navigation through menus, typically followed by a lengthy wait to talk to a human who in this case wasn’t any help in the “could it possibly be your router?” department. [If I remember correctly. Should a recorded call prove otherwise, I guess more self-flagellation is in order. And no you won’t find that in my search history.] At least I wasn’t charged for the callout, which one gathers is more unprecedented than not.
To be fair, once they had been prodded to action they were most attentive and I got loads of updates. Alas, too late, because in the meantime I had found a new provider of precious precious streamtime thanks to that forum.
Enter Andrews & Arnold. Not as cool a name as Zen, to be sure.
Your packets. Our people. is the banner on their homepage. Fortunately I have a vague idea what packets are, otherwise I might have fled in terror. After diving in I was pleased enough with the copywriting that I rang their salesman.
We made it through the what the hell is a copper pair? portion of the call and soon I was signing up. He had impressed me by not pushing a contract, so naturally I took one — reverse psychology works! Actually I did it for the free router, being freshly in need of one; due to the timing of things I hadn’t actually realised that when committing, so well done me.
My main worry was that downloads on my chosen plan would be capped. No more “unlimited”.
But I quickly discovered, after checking for the first time in 7 years, that my average monthly broadband use doesn’t rise above 100GB. 5x that should surely be way more than enough, right? Of course. And yet the exciting possibilities of ***UNLIMITED*** continued to haunt me even as we left the old world and entered the new.
(I’m not privy to A&A’s business plan, but not everyone wants to grow like topsy. Caps probably help keep the baying masses at bay.)
Some reviews had warned, amidst the glow, that it helped to be something of a techie yourself when contacting technical support. I stumbled a bit getting connected [minor marks down on the technical copywriting], but we got there without ruffled feathers. As a bonus, calling them is a pleasingly bare bones experience: you dial (an idiom that makes me sound as old, or in her case dead, as my grandmother), someone picks up.
Service has been better than before, with none of the slow periods we used to get in the evenings. An email to them even got the speed bumped up to where it should have been all along.
Keen to keep track of our stats, at least initially (I’m not generally a big stats guy; I don’t even have a cycle computer), I immediately logged in to see whatever my packets are up to. Much of it may as well have been in German, but one bit was disturbingly English:
Now, I was aware that A&A take a playful approach to naming their systems, but I have to admit this stung, because the truth often hurts. My wife sensibly told me not to take it personally, and utilising my higher cognitive functions I did concur, but lingering doubt remained because there’s an entire section of my brain where lingering doubt is stored.
Off went an email signed Clueless, carefully composed in such a way as to hide any fear that they had targeted me specifically. I only hoped I hadn’t been, well, foolish in sending it. With their kind permission to reprint, here is the reply:
The origin of the naming scheme was a Dilbert cartoon from the year 2000 which you can still see here :
https://dilbert.com/strip/2000-06-16
We actually do have a “pointy”, too!
Anyway, once we had a “clueless”, we needed names for other machines.
And sometimes words ending ~less did lend themselves nicely to some purposes; for example “nameless” worked well in a DNS server role, and “aimless” worked well for BGP routers. There are also nice ones like “timeless” (a time server) and of course, “wireless”! Oh, and “voiceless” also for voice-over-IP stuff.
But some names were just picked as they were another ~less word.
“gormless” is in that latter group; it doesn’t really make any specific sense and was just picked as another ~less word.
And what the pool of gormless machines does is to act as L2TP Network Servers (LNS). This is to say, they handle the incoming connections from our wholesale carriers (BT Wholesale, TalkTalk Business, and others), operating L2TP tunnels for each customer’s line. We have an awful lot of gormless machines, these days, which means we prefix the gormless name with a letter from a-z. So “a.gormless”, “b.gormless” etc. They now go all the way up to “w.gormless”!
Gradually these will be phased out and replaced by a smaller number of more performant LNS under the name “witless”. We currently only have three machines under the “witless” name, though.
Hopefully that gives you a bit of insight into how we do (and have done) things!
Kind regards,
I have definitely come to the right place.
