Teh intarwebs are back! We survived one whole week without Facebook! Without Twitter! I had to write my drivel on a typewriter! We read books! WHAT DID WE DO BEFORE WE HAD INTERNET?
A new router was waiting on the front stoop last night in a plain brown box, same as they deliver porn to your doorstep, because that’s what the internet is, when it comes down to it. I unwrapped it with trembling hands and, while My Darling B was preparing dinner, took the box downstairs and made all the connections. Didn’t read the instructions. I’m a guy. A guy don’t need no damn instructions.
Oh yes he does too, said the internet, which stubbornly refused to reconnect to our new router no matter how many times I clicked the mouse. After working my frustration to a frothy head, I tromped back up the stairs, dug the instructions out of the box, poured myself a glass of wine and settled into a chair by the kitchen table. Now there’s a wonderful way to relax on a Friday night: Sipping a glass of wine while reading Quick Setup Tips For Installing Your Router.
First thing it says on the first page I pick up under the heading “service activation:”
IMPORTANT! Please make sure that you install your equipment after 8:00 PM on your Service Activation Date. You can only connect to the Internet after your service has been activated.
I glanced up at the clock. It was quarter to eight. Okay, that could be a problem.
After tromping back down the stairs to unplug the router, I read the rest of the instructions to make sure I didn’t miss any other helpful tips or deadlines. If you ever have to read instructions for installing a Pace N411 router, I can recommend a delicious white wine to go with it.
B had dinner on the table at about the same time I finished, and I had to clean up after dinner, so obviously there was no router installation going on then. My first opportunity to get around to it was almost nine o’clock, but I felt like a movie and I had recently come into possession of a copy of Anatomy Of A Murder, an awesome Otto Preminger film starring Jimmy Stewart, although in my opinion the ubiquitous Arthur O’Connell all but stole the show by playing the most convincing alcoholic I’ve ever seen captured on film. And if you’ve never seen George C. Scott when he was just a pup, you’ve got to see him hounding one witness after another as the assistant district attorney. Great stuff.
Anatomy Of A Murder is a surprisingly long film, over two and a half hours, so it was way past my bedtime when the final credits rolled and I was too tired to do any at-home IT work. Installing the router had to wait until this morning after the cats woke me at five-thirty on the dot. Don’t get an alarm clock, get a cat. No snooze button, but punctual as hell.
Installing the modem did not go well. I had to spend an hour or so in an on-line chat room with a customer service rep who called herself “Patti” and may or may not have been human, I couldn’t tell. She seemed to be using a lot of canned answers that sounded as though they’d been carefully composed by a team of professional writers months or years ago, but every so often she’d lapse into l33t sp33k or use a slang term that I didn’t sound right coming from an AI. Whatever she was, she fed me all the right instructions to help me validate our account and connect to the internet. B will be so happy when she finds out she can distract herself by reading food blogs and updating her Facebook status instead of polishing her resume.