I've been that, only it was "processor", not "modem".

I've met a guy of the "Windows reinstaller" kind, who thought that you can reformat a hard drive if it has SMART warnings and they'll go away.

This may not be entirely false, if it rains in a wider area. Say, lots of people use the same infrastructure via wireless connections, and when it rains, their have packets dropped more often etc, sometimes connections interrupted because of this, then even on L3 there's more actual traffic because of resending packets, even on application level trying to do something many times instead of doing it once. So in the end there's more load on the same infrastructure, and the connection may be slower even for people connected via fiber. I'm not a network admin so this may look clumsy.

Well, life is less interesting for them than it could be.

Seen too much of similar things.

I've been that.

Actual criminals think differently from us, and I'd say there's an element of evolution to this, so they are likely right and we are likely wrong.