A few nights ago, Sunday, I believe, we had a rather ferocious windstorm, which howled all the night through. During that time (at least when we were awake) we had three, possibly four power outages...very short ones....not even lasting a minute. During those outages, our main computer was on and when the power went out, we just rebooted it and all seemed well....seemed being operative word here. The last outage happened when DH was playing his game and so he just rebooted it and then shut it down for the night.
Waking up the next morning, the wind had died down to a brisk breeze and the sun was out and all was well with the world. That is...until I went to go online....nothing happened. The computer usually automatically goes online when it's started up for the day....but there was just one single light glowing ominously from the modem and no "ingoing" or "outgoing" lights flashing at all. So I did all the usual stuff....unplugged the modem, plugged it back in....unplugged the router, plugged it back in.....and then I phoned Shaw.....
So.....I waited for close to an hour for the tech support from Shaw....and yah, yah, I know, I can hang up and have them call me back and I won't lose my friggin' place in line...(the recording sounds SO patronizing!!)...but I just have a feeling that if I hang up, that'll be it....I'll never get to talk to them again!!!So....I put on my telephone earphones and waited....and waited....and waited......until finally a young man called Jeff talked to me. He gave me some options to try and then seemed to think that should work and left me to it...so to speak. Well....it didn't work.....so I called Shaw again....and waited....and waited.....and waited...only this time, I got smart....I kept my earphones on, hung on to the cordless and did a few household chores...thereby relieving the guilt of not doing anything!! I finally got through a second time to another young fellow called Steve, I think....and he tried some more options....some even included changing some settings (that gets scary!)....but in the end...nothing worked, so he scheduled a Shaw techie to pay us a visit the next day and check things out.
I fretted (as I am wont to do in these situations) and so I thought I would head downstairs to practice. My laptop is in my practice studio, so being the eternal optimist that I am, I thought..."why don't I just open the lid on my laptop and un-hibernate it and see if it goes online??" Well....bless my soul if it didn't go right to my homepage and sat there blinking at me....Windows Messenger and all!! Whooee!!! I was ecstatic!! I calmed down enough to do at least 15 - 20 minutes of practice and then back to the laptop. In the meantime...hubby was upstairs on the main computer offline and playing his game. Nyeh nyeh na nyeh na!!!!
So here's the thing you see. I couldn't believe how excited I was to actually have the internet back.....it's an addiction of sorts which I'm sure some of you are also afflicted with to some degree. I am addicted to regular contact with the internet.....sigh.....whenever my mind goes into neutral mode, I find myself heading to the computer room. Maybe it's sort of like something to kickstart the mind working again. Is this a good thing?? Not totally sure and don't know if I care much..... but.....it's always interesting and enlightening and whenever it gets to the point that it isn't....I shall stop, I'm sure.
The Shaw techie did show up at 9:30 yesterday morning and found that our ethernet card on the main computer had been "fried" by the power outages...which is odd because we have 2 surge protectors. However, he did say that it was an older card...probably on it's last legs....so he very kindly replaced it and now we have internet on both...count them BOTH computers. Sigh.....life is good!!
Slainte!!
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