At this stage, I can not believe that people lived without being connected to the internet. I remember as a child standing in front of the tape recorder to speak missives on tape that were subsequently packaged in a cardboard box and sent via snail mail for the grandparents to listen to a week or so later . We thought about telephone calls, and timed them so that the bill wouldn't be too high. Phone calls to the grandparents happened no more than once a month. Now we chatter on the phone ALL the time -- in the car (dangerous to our health), in the grocery, in the doctor's office, in the movies, at the opera. There seems to be no place safe from the cell phone (Don't you love hearing those conversations when you are using a public restroom???? I have some sort of weird performance anxiety and just can't pee if the person in the stall next to me is chatting away on their phone. Everyone is all about making it illegal to talk and drive, how about making it illegal to talk and excrete?).
Wh
en I was in college, people were beginning to use computers for word processing. During graduate school, the internet began to take hold. We had one computer in the department the first year that was connected to the internet. Three years later, ALL of the computers were connected. (I wrote my thesis on an OLD Mac with TWO floppy drives!) Now, people don't even use those floppy drives! Am I that OLD? Probably.But back to being disconnected. For the past 6 months or so, I have had a disconnect problem -- about once every 6 weeks I lose connection to the internet and start IMMEDIATE withdrawal. This outage problem ALWAYS happens on the weekend. As soon as I realize that I have a connection issue that has lasted for more than 60 minutes, it starts: the fear, the angst, the cold sweat, the nausea..... I can still work on computer related things that don't require connectivity, but the fact that I can't connect leaves me unable to work. The first time, my cable provider told me it was on their end....for some reason, this glitch had to be bumped to the highest level technical group so I was without service for 3 days. The next time, there was an outage in my area, and I was the first to report it, so initially, they thought it was just me....the next time, some thing-a-ma-bob had to be reset and I was up and going.
Sunday morning, my service went out. Again. I went for my usual jog, and when it was still out, I called. I knew it was early, but I have learned that early morning/middle of the night calls to my IP don't require as much wait time. We went through the usual: disconnect the power from the modem, wait 30 seconds, now reconnect. I had already done all those things. In the end, they told me they would send out a technician. I laughed. I think it was a slightly hysterical laugh-- I live in small town NE Texas, and the last time they said I needed a technician it was going to be FIVE days before one could come out (thankfully, that problem turned out to be the area wide outage that they didn't know about, yet!). Well, surprise! I nice young man came to my door Sunday afternoon -- he checked this connection and that connection and told me that it was because I had a splitter where I just needed a male to male connection. He fixed that, and I was up and running....for 48 hours.
So, when I didn't have service last night, I called at peak hours, staying on hold for 20 minutes. This guy put me through a NEW contortion -- unplug your modem and take it to another cable outlet in the house. WHAT! I have a computer armoire It weighs....well.....far more than I do. Behind that armoire is a jumble of wires that aren't easy to unjumble. After struggling, holding the phone to my ear (I swear I could hear the guy smirking), I finally got the right wire and unplugged the modem and took it to another outlet. He then told me that the problem was either my wiring or my modem. Not enough pings coming through , yada, yada, yada. For some reason, I find myself losing faith. Shouldn't they have already alerted me to the ping paucity when the nice gentleman came to my house on Sunday?
At work today, I was lamenting my lack of connectivity.
A colleague turned to me and said, "you mean, you don't have a Geek Guy?"
"Geek Guy??? Well, no......"
"Oh, you must get one. I have one that is just EXCELLENT. He comes on the weekend and everything....it's an emergency if you aren't connected. He understands."
A man that understands and helps with the angst of being disconnected?? This MIGHT have some potential! I didn't realize they had made such a man.
Well,
I didn't get a reference for a GG, because I was determined to try to trouble shoot my problem. Tonight, I stopped at Office Max and bought my own lil' Geek Guy to solve my connectivity problems -- I think he's kind of cute. He's got two little blue eyes with cute little antenna ears. I can look up and he's winking at me from the top of the armoire. I already had a wireless router for my computer, but it was hard wired into my main computer, and it seems that the cable into the kitchen, to which the entire assembly has been connected (I have a long cable running to my study), may be the problem. For a moment, when I first unpacked my lil' Geek Guy, I panicked -- it appeared that I might need to connect to the internet to get the lil' GG going. Now, I know this lil' wireless GG isn't going to help me on the next problem, but he did bypass the current impasse, and for that I am quite thankful. I also managed to get him going without having to call a human GG.Hug your hounds!
