In the morning Esmeralda stayed at home so we could go to the office of our Internet Service Provider, Megacable Xalapa, to make clear to them that we want the Internet connection back as soon as possible. Before we went, Esme went carefully through our contract that clearly states that we don't have to pay for the time we have no connection after 24 hours of reporting.
At the Megacable office, the girl had to reread the contract several times, and told us that it indeed was the case. However, she didn't want to hand us a refund ticket or some other kind of proof. She said that just telling it when we pay the next bill would be enough. I really believed her... not. Anyway, we have written down her name, just in case.
After a long, heated discussion, Esme was able to get some kind of promise that someone would show up between four and six in the afternoon, today.
About ten minutes before six we got a phone call. If we had tried to disconnect the cable modem and reconnect it again. Yes, of course I had, several times even.
At last, a few minutes after six, the support guy showed up. He just replaced the old cable modem, which looked like it was several years old and severely abused already when it was installed, with a new one, made by Motorola. However, it did not work with my router, a D-Link DI-604. So this network guru came up with a nice solution, he just removed the whatchamacallit. I made clear that he could not leave before the set up worked as it originally had been in use, and tried to help him. Somehow the "clone MAC" router option was not needed with this modem, and after restoring the router's MAC the connection worked.
As a test I downloaded my access log file of this website, and discovered that the 512kbps Internet connection I was paying for had been dropped to a meagre 64kbps. Esme wrote an angry email in Spanish for me to Megacable stating that we were amazed at their lack of professionalism.