Internet Issues

If anyone had ever asked, I’d have denied it-and I’d have sincerely believed it as the words exited my mouth. But over the past eighty-five hours I know that to deny it now would be a lie.
I am addicted to the internet.

I am an internet addict. A junkie who hasn’t had a ‘fix’ since my combination modem/ router kicked the bucket Friday night at eleven.

It was clear when I glanced up and saw all three green lights gone that this was more than just one of those momentary lapses in service. The kind that lasts about two minutes, when the middle light starts flashing yellow for reasons known only to itself.

The tech support guy suggested I try plugging the router in some other outlets around the house to see if the outlet it had been plugged in to since we moved in January had suddenly gone bad.

Yeah, right.

It’s been plugged in to the same power strip the computer, monitor, speakers and both of my printers are plugged in to-and those things were still working. So what were the odds that just one little area in that whole long power strip just stopped working? Pretty slim odds, in my opinion.

But, having been in the middle of a ‘job,’ and it being late Friday night, I gave it a shot. Only to find, sadly, that I was right. The power strip was working just fine. Only the modem/router wasn’t. It had given up the ghost and there was no coaxing it back, beyond an extremely brief flash of lights when an electrician friend suggested I push the reset button with an ink pen (something the tech support guy failed to mention, hmm).

So...

I telephone my internet provider first thing Saturday morning to find they want eighty bucks for a new router that would take several days to get here.

Not good. I needed to finish the job by Sunday at midnight so thanks but no thanks. I need to find one today. And I’m hoping for far less money, too, since payday is more than a week away!
Another yeah, right. Try a hundred dollars at a well known computer store. Forget it. I’ll be kissing every cent (and then some!) from the thing I was working on goodbye. I’ll just wait for the second deadline-the middle of next month and turn in both months worth of work then.

Unfortunately I didn’t come to this conclusion until after the sales office closed for the day, not to reopen until Monday morning.

Over the course of the weekend I talked again with my electrician friend, as well as someone who builds and repairs computers. The router should have lasted about ten years, not four. So when I got through to the sales department yesterday morning, I mentioned that information and asked for a discount. The woman put me on hold for a minute and came back with a very surprising offer.

They would waive the $80.00 if I was willing to pay $13.00 shipping.

Hmm... Eighty dollars, thirteen dollars. Eighty dollars or thirteen dollars... Actually it would have been eighty dollars plus the shipping. So the choice boiled down to ninety-three dollars or thirteen.

Tough choice.

Not!

For that kind of deal-and I really was just hoping that they’d knock the price down by half!-I opted for the overnight delivery.

Except overnight delivery is kind of misleading. I ordered the router well before seven-thirty yesterday morning. It is now twelve-forty-nine in the afternoon on Tuesday and it still hasn’t arrived. But it’s coming via UPS and I know they have routes to follow.

Knowing that doesn’t help my impatience because, as I mentioned in the beginning of this blog, I’ve discovered that I am addicted to the internet. It’s kind of like the night before Christmas, waiting for dawn and the time to tear in to all the presents.

Only I just want to tear in to my email! I want to Google recipes for smoked sausage since I screwed up and thawed some out yesterday. I want to visit IMDB and find out when Minnie Pearl died (don’t ask...I don’t know why...).

And I want to finish September’s job so I can get started on October’s.

Mainly, though, I really want to check my email. I’m almost scared at the thought. It’s hard to believe but a good portion of the population doesn’t know what ‘inline text is.’ Nope. They send everything as an attachment.

And you know what that means?

That after three and a half days (is that all it’s been??!!), it could take two weeks for all my emails to download...

Sigh.