I push all the buttons around here.

I’m learning more and more each day but I’ve discovered I’m just bad at networking.  Not quite as bad as our ISP apparently.

I finally purchased a router for church.  Our ISP has a router in place that they refused to give us access to.  I figured (and stated in an earlier post) it contained sensitive WEP information.  Apparently, I’m wrong.  They just won’t let us have access to it.  I really don’t understand this.  Anyway, when our network refused to see the internet connection I called the ISP.

I’m going to spare some details simply because I would like to forget this evening.  However, after 3 different phone calls, 3 different techs, and 3 completely different stories, I’ve decided they hate their customers.  I would say they are incompetent but that is harder for me to believe.  They refuse to tell me why I can’t access their router…yet to make our network work their router had to come out of the loop.  Yep, it’s getting shipped back.  It’s a stupid Linksys router that is a dime a dozen at Staples and we are paying for as part of our internet bill…but we can’t use it.
I wasn’t even told until the 3rd phone call that their router shouldn’t be in the loop and should be bypassed.  The techs prior gave me a completely different story and said it did need to be connected.  Every tech was told up front what I was trying to do.  I hadn’t done any configuring to the router.  It was straight out of the box.  I plugged it in at home and it worked great.  It’s a basic PPPoE connection.  This just shouldn’t have been so hard.

I’m frustrated I wasted hours just to get an internet connection that should have taken 5 minutes.

I’m angry every answer was different from the ISP.

I’m still confused on why I couldn’t just use their router; it obviously doesn’t have sensitive information in it otherwise my router wouldn’t work without theirs.
Whatever.  I finally figured it out.  I’ve reconfigured all the computer on our network.  It’s secure, I know how it’s setup, and it’s finally documented.  All is happy.  Tomorrow the server gets implemented!