back in the seventies the unions all went on strike for silly things like being paid for thirty years after they quit working. Not that they ever worked in the first place, mind you. With two months of vacation, two weeks of paid sick leave and two weeks of holiday days they worked almost nine months out of the year.
But then they figured out quadruplle overtime and figured out that if they didn't work during regular business hours they could get paid to not work during overtime hours on a holiday during their vacation.
So now they were getting paid four times their normal exorbitant wage to not work during holidays because no one expected them to work on holidays anyways I mean
c'mon it's a holidays!!!
So you pay these guys four hundred dollars or so an hour to sit around and complain about upper management. Which is fine except they still weren't actually doing any work and the companies were all going bankrupt.
So, the companies built entirely new companies and factories overseas in china, hired local workers who would do all the work the union workers refused to do at four hundred dollars an hour for about fifty cents a day.
Which was great except nobody new how to speak the regional dialects of the workers that actually built the products for companies to sell to other companies that were now no longer actually making anything. And they were never taught english because china was going to take over the world and make everyone speak chinese anyways.
So then, they went into entirely different third world countries where they spoke a little english and hired them to provide technical support for the products they no longer made.
And it gets even better.... Then they also outsourced their sales to whoever would sell their products. Those salesmen sold them to the cable company and now you have your cable modem...
So you call your cable company to provide technical support on a product they didn't make, but they also didn't buy it from someone who understood it, it was just some guy working out of his basement who doesn't even know what it does. He got it from a company that didn't make it either, they bought it from another company in china that doesn't speak english and then hired another company in india to do the technical support.
However, since the cable company didn't buy the product from the company that didn't make it they don't have access to the indian company that was hired to do the support.
So the cable company hires a sixth company to provide technical support to you on a product no one has ever seen.
You call the cable company, your call gets routed to tech support, they call the cable company, the cable company calls the salesman, the salesman calls the factory, the factory calls the other factory in china who calls the technical support company in india who also has never actually seen the modem you have the problem with.
So the indian company tasked with providing technical support calls the factory to tell the other factory to tell the salesman to tell the cable company to tell the other technical service provider...WHO coincidentally is sitting in the crate right next to the first guy to tell you to ask...
HAVE YOU TRIED TURNING IT OFF AND BACK ON AGAIN?