Modem de-linking: spotted by a resourceful librarian

In my enthusiasm to blog on matters relating to Jump, I have been caught out by a resourceful Auckland librarian. He was using his research skills to brush up on the modem delinking process and discovered one of my blog posts from 2020 explaining this. However, when he went to our Stepping UP website he discovered a totally different explanation.

The problem is that things change. Yet old blog posts, like many other online things, tend to hang around well beyond their useful date.   In fact if they hang around too long, I guess they will be picked up by OpenAI systems like ChatGPT or Bard and then get shared as mis-information. So what is the truth? A question I suspect we will be asking a lot more in the future.

While some of the advice in my 2020 post is still relevant, the detailed procedures were replaced by the flow chart on our website around the middle of 2022.  There was a blog post about this change too, but anyone searching on ‘de-linking Jump modems’ wouldn’t find this because it doesn’t use the keyword ‘de-link’. Instead it celebrates the launch of new procedures for handling faulty Jump modems.

Just in case anyone is unsure about current Jump modem fault handling procedures, here it is in a nutshell.

The default procedure is for customers to contact the Skinny Care Team in the first instance if they are having trouble with their modems.  Our back-end processes then take care of themselves with the modem either being fixed remotely or a replacement and recovery courier bag being sent directly to the customer.  The other path involving Jump Delivery Partners is for when customers don’t follow this procedure and turn up with a faulty modem at a delivery partner.  In this case we ask partners to complete the Modem Returns form and await email advice from the Skinny team that the modem has been reset and is available for re-issue, or if it is faulty a courier bag will be sent to the partner for recovery.  It can take up to 24 hours for the old modem to be delinked from the customer’s account and this must happen before the customer can use their same email to set up a new modem.

So as much as I hate to say it, my 2020 blog post is of historical interest only and should be ignored by present day partners.  The new procedures completely replace the need for partners to call the Skinny Care team or send emails to the Skinny support team.

But this is also a challenge for information specialists. In a digital world how do we ‘retire’ old and obsolete information. Does anyone really have the time to keep reviewing the past and correcting these things?

But the really good news is that people, like the Auckland librarian who raised this issue, are still around, and what do they do when they find conflicting information – they seek out the truth.