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What a network failure taught me about marketing perseverance
Introduction
You may be too young to remember a TV series called “When Animals Attack.” It ran in the late 1990s and featured dramatic footage of wildlife encounters that did not go well for the humans involved. It was the kind of show you watched from the safety of your couch, grateful that your biggest problem that evening was the remote control. I thought of that title recently when my home network decided to have its own dramatic moment.
It Begins
It started on a Friday afternoon. At 1:20 PM, my internet went down. That happens occasionally — a provider hiccup, some maintenance work, the usual. You wait it out. Except this time, the wait stretched past dinner, past the evening news, past midnight, and all the way to 2:15 in the morning. Thirteen hours without internet service.
Not the end of the world. Annoying, yes. But manageable.
What happened next, though, was a different story.
The Second Hit
When the service went down again late Sunday morning, something felt different. When the provider restored service, my network still wouldn’t connect. Not a signal problem. Not a provider problem. Something closer to home had gone wrong.
I started working through the possibilities the way you do when you’ve spent a long time solving problems that don’t come with instruction manuals: methodically, without panic. Check the obvious things first. Rule them out. Move to the less obvious. Repeat.
Eventually, I identified a network device that had apparently been damaged — either during the outage or as a result of it. These things happen. Power fluctuations, electrical noise on the line, and equipment that was already running close to the edge of its lifespan. The long outage on Friday may have simply been the event that pushed it over.
Here’s where it gets interesting, or really frustrating.
The Troubleshooting Phase Nobody Talks About
I tried multiple configurations with the damaged device. Nothing worked. So I bought a new cable modem — tested it in every configuration I could think of. Still no joy. Then I purchased a WiFi router. After some patient testing and adjustment, that finally did the trick.
Total time from “my network is down” to “everything is back up and running”: a few days of diagnosis, purchasing, and configuration work spread across the week.
And when I say “everything,” I mean everything. Five desktop computers. Two laptops. Two tablets. A mix of Windows, Linux, and Android. A network printer accessible to all of them. Shared drives mapped across multiple computers from a file server, which I had to reconfigure, with a second file server still to go as I write this.
All our video is through streaming. No cable TV, no broadcast. I have a computer connected to our 65″ screen in the living room and it depends on an internet connection.
None of that recovery is especially glamorous. It’s just the work.
Why I’m Telling You This
I’m not sharing this story to impress anyone. Honestly, anyone with the same background would have done the same things in the same order. That’s kind of the point.
I spent twenty years in IT computer support at a major university. Two decades of “it’s broken, figure out why, fix it, document what you did, move on to the next one.” You work on systems that hundreds of people depend on. You learn that panic doesn’t help, that assumptions are dangerous, and that the answer is almost always in there somewhere if you keep looking.
What that experience gave me isn’t a superpower. It’s just a particular way of approaching problems: start with what you know, test your assumptions, don’t skip steps, and keep going when the first three things you tried didn’t work.
The Marketing Connection
Here’s what I find myself thinking about.
A lot of the work I do now – marketing work, content work, helping people and businesses get found and get results – runs on exactly the same logic.
Something isn’t working. A campaign underperforms. A website doesn’t convert. Content gets published and disappears without a trace. Traffic shows up but doesn’t turn into anything. The instinct for many people is to either panic or give up. Try one thing, and if it doesn’t work, assume the whole endeavor is broken.
But most marketing problems aren’t broken; they’re just not yet diagnosed.
The question is usually not whether something can be fixed, but whether you’re willing to work through the process. Check the obvious things. Rule them out. Test a new configuration. Try a different approach. Accept that the first thing you buy or implement might not be the solution, and that’s okay — it’s information.
I ordered a replacement for the device that seemed to have failed – a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter. Then I saw it would take a week to arrive. I didn’t want to be offline for that long, so I started working on a patchwork solution.
I didn’t have confidence in my 15-year-old cable modem provided by the cable company (I do not have and have never had cable TV). So, I bought a 3rd party cable modem that didn’t solve the problem. That wasn’t a failure; that was data. It confirmed the problem was somewhere else, which pointed me toward the device that actually did solve it as part of my workaround configuration.
Marketing works the same way. The ad that didn’t convert told you something. The email that nobody opened told you something. The content that got ignored told you something. The question is whether you’re reading those results as dead ends or as clues.
Perseverance Isn’t a Personality Trait
I want to push back gently on the way perseverance usually gets talked about in marketing and business circles — as though it’s some quality that certain people have and others don’t. A kind of grit that you either possess or you don’t.
In my experience, perseverance in technical work (and in marketing, which is increasingly technical) is mostly just method. It’s having a process that tells you what to try next when the current thing isn’t working. It’s knowing that “this didn’t work” means try the next thing, not stop trying.
The people who seem unusually persistent at solving hard problems aren’t usually grinding on willpower. They’re following a diagnostic process that keeps producing next steps. The work continues because there’s always a reasonable next thing to do.
That’s learnable.
That’s teachable.
That’s not magic.
What’s Still On The List
As I write this, the replacement for the EdgeRouter device that actually failed is still on order. I’m running a functional workaround in its place. One file server still needs to be reconfigured with a new IP address and reconnected to all the computers on the network.
But everything works. The network is up. The printer is accessible. The shared drives are mapped. The internet is running across ten devices, and we can stream video even if the internet speed is severely hampered. But as far as functionality, the workaround is holding.
A few days of steady, methodical work through a genuinely frustrating situation – and the outcome is a fully functional home network that allowed me to create and publish this post.
That’s usually how it goes when you stick with it.
Of course, I’ll have to break it all down again when the replacement edge router arrives, so I can re-integrate it. Hopefully, I’ll get back to 400+ mbps speeds instead of the 20 – 25 mbps I’m currently getting on this patchwork setup.
Wish me luck!
Conclusion
The original “When Animals Attack” was popular because watching other people survive dramatic encounters from a safe distance is compelling television. Tech failures are rarely as cinematic. But the principle is similar: something came at you, you didn’t freeze, you dealt with it, and you walked away intact.
Sometimes that’s the whole story worth telling.
Be sure to keep an eye on the downloads offered in the margins. Every post has an offer for a free pdf and 7 day email mini-course. Just help yourself.
Til next time,
Dave Hodges
DUH WEB Media Group
DUH WEB Marketing Insight
duhwebmediacontact@gmail.com
P.S. – Have you been through a “Tech Attack”? Share your experience in the comments.
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