Dead cable modem

While I was gone on my brief Christmas vacation over the last week, my computer back at home disappeared from the internet - the IP address did not respond to any connection attempts at all.

Naturally I feared the worst, namely that some thieves broke into my apartment and stole all my stuff, or something like that. Fortunately, when I got home I discovered that the cable modem had simply stopped working, and everything else was fine.

There may have been a power outage or some other electrical anomaly while I was gone, because the cable modem seemed to be fried. When I plugged it in, all the LED lights turned on but it didn't seem to do anything else. I searched around on the internet but couldn't really determine what these symptoms meant, or how to fix the problem (for the reference of anybody searching for the same thing in the future, it's a Terayon TJ 715x cable modem).

What happened next was the most amazing thing I have experienced all week. I thought for sure that I would have to call Comcast, argue with them ("yes, I tried rebooting the computer.."), make an appointment for two weeks in the future, which they would be late for, causing me to miss work, etc. (being without internet access the whole time, of course).

What actually happened was that I called Comcast, immediately got a real person on the other end, explained the problem, and got a maintenance appointment scheduled for "right away". A half hour later, the guy showed up, swapped out my modem with a new one, and now everything works again. In total, it took about 45 minutes.

So I am pleasantly surprised that Comcast had such good customer service and I was able to get the problem fixed so quickly. Of course, this doesn't excuse them blocking our, uh, bible, downloads, but there has definitely been a lot of improvement since my last encounter with them.