High Tech Wimp

If you've been wondering how it is I can post three times in one day and then not again for a week (all one or two of you out there), my excuse this time is a crapped-out cable Internet connection. The service had been degrading for some days, but I think I just couldn't face it because it meant dealing with the dreaded Cable Company. Then my connection died completely and I was stranded away from the digital world.

It's terrifying.

Worse, I actually had some responsibilities to attend to that required the Internet--no, Mr. or Ms. Wiseass, it wasn't my daily porno review. I actually mentor a grad student in writing and had a paper to return to him, I've found a lovely part-time job (I love semi-retirement!) and needed to fill out some forms, and yes, I wanted to look at some porn, although it was guitar porn over at Elderly Instruments. Okay, and maybe a little skin, but just a little. And, worst of all, my faithful and less-than-faithful blog readers (I guess that might get us up to three or four) would be left Olafless. Talk about terror!

Of course, I kept trying my connection in the hope that it was only a momentary glitch, a gremlin in the line, a mistyped login, something other than an actual outage. Like the rat in a Skinner box pressing the lever helplessly long after the experiment is over, I kept bringing up browsers, mailers, even pinging IP addresses, fer Chrissake. It's humiliating and oddly common behavior among those who now live and die by the Internet. I can take the loss of telephone service (in fact, I welcome it), or an electrical blackout due to thunderstorms or high winds, or even a broken automobile, but trying to get cable service is something that I dread like a Protestant in Spain dreaded Tomas de Torquemada.

It didn't help that the first five times I called, the Cable Company automated call center cheerfully invited me to try their new digital phone service before dropping my call with the rapid beep-beep-beep of a non-existent number. The fourth and fifth times it actually exhibited the intelligent sadism to place me on hold for five minutes before throwing my call away. So I gave up and headed for a local Internet coffee house.

As if hounded for my sins, alas, no connection was to be had there, either. I asked the barrista if I had the right password to their wireless service and she said yes, but they'd been having some problems lately. Uh-oh--now I was certain that it was a server farm meltdown somewhere out in Cable Company and they were not going to respond to anybody.

One last refuge--our local university at which I maintain my faculty status by a slender reed. If I could only get onto their wireless network. I had to scrounge 75 cents to pay to park (my tag expired in August, and I ain't paying no $200 for the privilege of unlimited parking), but beneath the dog hair, dried mud, dessicated buggers and broken sunglasses I found two quarters and a dime, enough for forty minutes. Thanks to a helpful library employee, I gained access to their VPN and discovered, to my horror, that critical emails were flying at me from all directions. I became a man possessed, clattering across the keyboard like Nijinsky on the stage in St. Petersburg, flinging answers, references, recommendations, referrals, rejections, and reverences to all points of the globe.

Finally, there was nothing left to do but return home to make The Call.

I got through. The tech support ran tests to my modem. A repair person would be dispatched in an hour. Sure, I thought as my teeth gnashed at the malicious twisting of my hopes.

He showed up. He replaced all the cabling, the box, the interal connections, everything inside of thirty minutes and was gone almost before I could tip him in my elation.

So now I'm back, and I have to confess that the boogie man turned into the good guy in the white hat. I love the Cable Company again, and I'm sorry I ever thought those terrible, nasty, unfounded things.

I was really, really wrong. Maybe I should try their digital phone service. Or are they just messing with me to get me in a big sting?