Step One: Restart the Router

By the time Rasmus dialed his provider, he had a page of notes in front of him. He’d restarted the router twice, once with the button and once by pulling the plug out of the wall for a full minute. He’d changed the cable. He’d tested it on the laptop and on his phone with the mobile data off. He’d written down the four lights on the front of the box and which two were the wrong color. He had a meeting at eleven.

The woman who answered was friendly and in no hurry whatsoever. She asked him to restart the router.

Rasmus told her he’d done that twice already and read her the times. She said she understood, and asked him to do it again while she stayed on the line.

So he did it. They waited ninety seconds and listened to nothing happen. Then she asked him to plug the laptop straight into the box, and he told her that was step three on his page, and she said she could hear that it was, and could he do it anyway.

He did it anyway. She asked for the lights. He read them out; he’d copied them down at twenty past eight and they hadn’t changed.

Then she went quiet and said she was running a test on the line. When she came back, her voice had changed. There was a fault on the cabinet that served his street, reported at ten past eight that morning. An engineer was on it already. Four o’clock, probably.

“Could you have told me that at the start?” he asked. He wasn’t angry. He honestly wanted to know.

She said the fault list was organized by cabinet, not by customer, and the line test was what put his address on it. Until she ran it, he was a phone number, not a street.

At half past twelve he walked up to the corner for a coffee. The van was two hundred meters from his own front door: a hole in the pavement, two cones, two men who had clearly been there since eight. He’d walked past them with the recycling that morning and hadn’t looked twice.

Neither of the men in the hole could have told him it was his hole. The woman on the phone couldn’t go looking for it until he’d restarted the router one more time. So he’d restarted the router one more time, and got, by the longest possible road, an answer he could have seen from the corner.