Broken ISP?

Sometimes, IT things go wrong, really wrong. Here's a case in point, as illustrated by the following trace:

Tracing route to www.c.....r.com [24.217.29.127] over a maximum of 30 hops:
  1     1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  192.168.x.y
  2     9 ms     7 ms     8 ms  10.148.0.1
  3    23 ms     7 ms     9 ms  96.34.25.120
  4     8 ms     9 ms    11 ms  96.34.25.143
  5     9 ms     9 ms     9 ms  96.34.25.148
  6    12 ms    10 ms    11 ms  96.34.25.147
  7    13 ms    10 ms    11 ms  96.34.25.167
  8    14 ms    12 ms    13 ms  96.34.17.2
  9    15 ms    17 ms    16 ms  96.34.16.145
 10    17 ms    15 ms    18 ms  96.34.16.228
 11    16 ms    14 ms    16 ms  96.34.2.78
 12    24 ms    22 ms    23 ms  96.34.0.9
 13    24 ms    23 ms    24 ms  96.34.0.67
 14    34 ms    35 ms    33 ms  96.34.0.64
 15    34 ms    32 ms    33 ms  96.34.0.69
 16    34 ms    42 ms    34 ms  24.217.29.211
 17    33 ms    41 ms    35 ms  24.217.29.127
Trace complete.

Now, if you're not familiar with traceroutes, you might not get the significance of this lengthy set of IP addresses. The problem is that 17 hops to go from my ISP's cable modem connection to my ISP's own web server is evidence of a major configuration goof.

To make matters worse, when a customer calls and mentions things like DNS, traceroute, DHCP, it might be worth paying attention instead of asking them to reboot into safe mode.