is this what passes for support these days dear god. when using Microsoft you would be surprised by how many issues can be fixed with a restart. but make sure no one is playing an office prank and unplugged the ethernet cable. go check and see if your network adapter has not been disabled for some weird reason. if you company uses standard practice and passwords need to be changed monthly make sure your password did not expire. unfortunately I can't tell you to check everything but these are the most common network problems I encounter at my work not all I.T people are bad dont hate us all :P

Four! I mean, five! I mean fire!

why did you call tech support if you know whats wrong? fix it

Before I give the tech support # to people at my work, I have to ask questions to see if they've tried this and that. I talked with one guy and asked if he had turned it on and off. He told me he works with computers and knows what he's doing. Well...obviously he didn't since that's what he needed to do.

If you know what the problem is, why haven't you fixed it yourself by now? YDI

There are two reasons "did you turn it on and off" is generally the first question, by the by. Tier 1 tech support gets a lot of calls on a lot of issues, and there's usually six or seven prime causes for different issues, especially when it comes to network connectivity. By going through the checklist, they can usually weed through a support ticket quickly, because one of those six or seven prime causes will generally fix the problem. Tier 1 generally *won't* listen to "knowing exactly what the problem is" because in a stunningly large number of cases, the person on the other end *doesn't* know what the problem is. They know what they think the problem is because they had something similar happen once in a different situation and can't really tell the difference. I'm not saying the OP was like this -- I take the OP at their word. But it's why IT goes through the script. If the Tier 1 steps didn't fix the issue, any decent department should kick you to Tier 2, where you'll get someone who's able to go into troubleshooting with you. That Tier 2 person would be the one to get in deep on the less common issues. The problem is... way too many IT departments don't actually *have* a Tier 2 department, or have so few techs on Tier 2 that support tickets just pile up and the users end up catching the brunt. My condolences to the OP for being caught in one of those.

Unfortunately this happens a lot now a days

people are rude even when your trying to work

That does remind me of "The IT Crowd" show... xD

Fix it then!