Posted by Dell
Last day of the month. The time is flowing by quickly. Summer will be gone before I can even get a good complaint going about the heat and humidity, and winter will be here and I’ll wish I had never said a word.
Spent today waiting on the satellite company, spent yesterday waiting on the cable company. I love waiting for service people that have you completely at their mercy. In the end it all got straightened out and only half of today was wasted saying the same thing over and over as I was transferred to department after department.
I had bought into an advertisement on TV that promised satellite internet speeds as fast as cable. Just so you know it isn’t true at all. Not even close. So I went through the whole hook it up disconnect it thing. My own fault. If something sounds suspect it probably is. I know that, yet I still fell for it. And so you know, it costs a great deal to buy your way back out once you take the plunge, but I ate that too. Live and learn.
So that kept me away from my writing schedule today and my day off yesterday. I will fix that though. I have a little story in my head where a Cable company installer gets involved with a Satellite installers wife. The husband finds out and all hell breaks loose. That’s the nice thing about being a writer. You can get retribution and it isn’t even a felony.
We are about a third of the way through the writing process for book Five of the Earth’s Survivors series. It is coming along well. There is other writing for the 5th Zombie Plagues book happening at the same time as I mentioned last week. In any case it is going well. A few days of cable and satellite interruptions won’t bother it at all.
So while I was waiting on the satellite service today, I decided that it was a good time to move my wireless router since I was changing the service over, and make the location more central to both machines and the printer that use it. I was wrong. I mean it got moved but it was not a good day to do it. It’s 98 and 300% humidity. You need windshield wipers for your glasses. I ended up drilling holes and running wires, all of the things I didn’t want to do in this heat but somehow talked myself into. I am an idiot at times, I will admit that.
I went ahead and assumed it would all work out great. I unplugged the modem, collected up the new modem and then the wireless modem and went to work drilling the holes and running about 50′ of cable for Ethernet too. Got out my little wire staples and popped it all together nice and neat and turned it on. It worked great. It worked great for about 3 minutes and then it quit working. Shut it off and turn it back on and it’s fine for three more minutes then it’s off again. It has been such a crazy two months using brand B’s service that I seriously considered whether or not I could get my web stuff done in that three minute window. When I realized I was seriously considering it I kicked myself in the ass and went back to work trying to figure it out.
The router would take me to the router site but then it claimed that it couldn’t recognize the service provider and refused to set it all the way up. So I went step by step as it said to.
#1. Reset the unit and wait 2 minutes before you cycle through the start up process.
I waited two minutes, same three minutes of internet access and then nothing. It finally occurred to me that I had never reset the other modem, the cable company one. Should that matter? Yes, it should and did. A half hour later, my glasses sliding off my nose and sweat pouring down my face I reset it and it all came on and worked fine. Told you I was an idiot.
But really, I think I expect everything to be intuitive. Maybe ask me a question or two in a robotic voice and then proceed to setup. No problem. I hate technologies that can’t communicate with each other and so have no clue why they are not working and no ability to chat back and forth to you to find out. I know this is true because several times this morning I called the router a No good ***&^ and a &^^**%, and it made no difference. If someone had called me those things I definitely would have reacted. So I am puzzled as to why it didn’t. It didn’t have to say much, just a short Sorry, or even Wow, you screwed that up, right? Anything like that. But it stayed silent. Nothing at all to say.
I made it past that though and everything is hooked up and very fast. So I thought, well, I’ll take advantage of this super fast connection to access my account and cancel the old stuff and that was when things got even worse. Three hours later I managed to find an English understanding person in tech support, and least he sort of understood it, about as well as I understood him. So I got off the phone, started to put things away, and that was when the bee stung me.
Bees are usually not on my I hate you list. I pretty much ignore them and they ignore me. But this one was apparently sitting on the fourth step of my step ladder. I didn’t see him, and it’s odd he didn’t see me. I mean I’m only three thousand percent bigger than he is. But maybe he was thinking about the queen, what his life might have been like if he hadn’t fallen and became one of her workers, or maybe he had been out drinking the night before and had a hangover, no clue, but for whatever reason he never said a word as I leaned up against the ladder to collapse it to put it away. He said nothing but he did sting me.
I considered that the cap to my morning. Stung by the satellite company, then the cable company, then the bee. Bastards. That was morning. It’s now afternoon and 300 degrees with 500 percent humidity, that is about all that has changed. And of course it’s nearly 3:00 PM too. How in hell did that happen?
Well, there you go. That is my Monday, and I hope that your Monday is a lot better. I will be back on writing tomorrow, and from there the rest of the week stretches out pretty much problem free. I hope your day is problem free, and go download those free short stories. I’ll be back next Monday, Dell.
Home: https://www.wendellsweet.com
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