Stuff comes together. Not necessarily in any logical way. Usually, things sort of glue themselves into a messy ball then have to be dealt with, avoiding all the stick’um. Yuk.
Energizer Bunny (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I got up a lot earlier than I wanted to this morning. Heart and Soul was still rolling around my brain. It latches on to bits of music and replays them interminably until I’m ready to scream. I have the Energizer Bunny of brains, and apparently, it likes music but has very poor taste. Actually, this means Brain is not happy about something. The music is supposed to have a calming effect, but just irritates me.
What’s was the real problem? Oh, right.
A few minutes after midnight last night, Charter Communications, a remarkably poorly run organization which controls our lives — connectivity, telephone and television — in an unbreakable monopolistic grip and does a particularly inept job while charging exorbitant prices experienced an outage. That’s cable-speak for no nothing. No WiFi, telephone and very minimal TV.
Panic time.
I heaved a sigh, expelling three small dogs and a collie from my lap and with a groan, stood up. The groan is to let the world know how much I suffer. I don’t believe in silent suffering. Then I went to the office to reboot The Modem, hub of my universe.
I rebooted (that is, I unplugged it, counted to some number or other, replugged it) and waited for the lights to come on. For the magic to happen. The lights flickered weakly, but nothing more. So I did it again, counting up more numbers (a bit slower) and also unplugging and replugging the router.
Same result. I started to look around for something else to do. Unfortunately, there wasn’t anything more I could do. I didn’t know (yet) if the problem was hardware (dead modem?) or Charter or some bizarre other issue I hadn’t thought of. The router and modem are both Cisco and newish. Until now, totally dependable. Still no lights, or not the lights I wanted to see.
To prove to myself that I had not failed in my duty as 24/7 tech support for the household’s 12 computers (five people, 12 computers including three tablets but not counting iPods, iPhones and other small WiFi-based devices because I lost count of them years ago), I turned off all the computers on this floor (7) and then tried rebooting the modem because amidst the messages telling me to reboot the modem, I’d gotten one saying two computers were trying to use the same IP address and I should talk to the administrator (me) and frankly, I was flummoxed. I figured if I rebooted all the computers, they’d do whatever it is they do and that would take care of the IP problem, if indeed there was one (there wasn’t).
My World
Panic. Fear. Trembling. I starting humming loudly. Heart and Soul. Heart and Soul. I fell in love with you. Heart and Soul.
Very few things cause me to panic. I have put out fires including one flaming friend. I have dealt with a husband having a heart attack and a child having a seizure — without panic. But losing my WiFi? Panic. Irrational, hysterical, don’t talk to me I’m a crazy person panic.
I thought I should call Charter, except their telephone number is on the computer, but then I wondered if I might have it in the address book of my iPhone, then contemplated when I’d last charged the iPhone (last week?). Where is the phone? I couldn’t do what I usually do and call the cell from the house phone because we didn’t have a house phone. No cable. No signal. Breathe, Marilyn, breathe.
I found the phone, oddly enough where it belonged. Imagine that. I plugged it into life support (aka electricity) and called Charter. I hate calling Charter. I hate Charter’s so-called customer service. Everyone I know seems to hate their cable company but that’s not especially comforting. The whole “misery loves company” thing eludes me. Miserable company doesn’t make me happier. It just reminds me I’m miserable.
I called Charter. After I got through the maze of prompts (press 1 or 2 or 7 or 9 or STAR to do what?) and got a person, she said oh, yeah, there’s an outage. A big one. No idea how long it will take to fix. Would you like us to call you with updates? I said my phone was out and all I had was a cell phone. She offered to call my cell phone. I said sure, why not because by then, everything would be fixed and I wouldn’t care anymore.
She said “Have a nice evening and thank you for using Charter Communications.” I was humming Heart and Soul very loudly and had begun to rock back and forth, rhythmically, mindlessly.
I gave up, hung up and went to bed. I couldn’t read the book I wanted on my Kindle because it’s somewhere in Amazon’s cloud and I can’t get it delivered without WiFi.
It got me thinking, especially when I got up this morning and all the computers were very funky and needed multiple restarts because Microsoft sent down a ton of updates overnight and they seemed to have gotten stuck, that this whole concept of abandoning hard drives and personal storage and putting all your stuff up in The Cloud is moronic and dangerous because (are you ready?) — THERE IS NO CLOUD.
There are just lots of great big servers all over the place that store data, some better than others, who knows where, accessible to who knows who. Worse, all of us — you and me and everyone — is entirely at the mercy of whatever company provides our high-speed connectivity. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. Pass the pipe, while you are at it.
Heart and soul, heart and soul.
Heart and soul, I fell in love with you,
Heart and soul, the way a fool would do,
Madly…
Because you held me tight,
And stole a kiss in the night…
Heart and soul, I begged to be adored,
Lost control, and tumbled overboard,
Gladly…
That magic night we kissed,
There in the moon mist.
Oh! but your lips were thrilling, much too thrilling,
Never before were mine so strangely willing.
But now I see, what one embrace can do,
Look at me, it’s got me loving you,
Madly…
That little kiss you stole,
Held all my heart and soul.
Still feel like trusting your world to The Cloud? It’s the biggest scam ever! And we’re buying it. How many kinds of stupid are we? You know as soon as we all are safely in their clutches, the “free cloud storage” won’t be free. Adobe and Microsoft and other companies want to stop selling us our software and rent it to us, so we won’t own anything at all, not our own files, software, nothing. In addition to the mega-bill we pay for our high-speed services, we’ll also be paying separately for each piece of software we use. Our cost of living will keep going up, but not our incomes.
Remember, you heard it here on Serendipity.
Related articles
- How Many Phone Transfers Does it Take?… (angelswearplaid.com)
- Daily Prompt: Earworm (dailypost.wordpress.com)
- It’s official – I’ve got an earworm! (tuilere.wordpress.com)
- Daily Prompt: Earworm (ambikarani.wordpress.com)
- DP Daily Prompt: Earworm Post by Ranu (sabethville.wordpress.com)
- Daily Prompt: Earworm (cocobabylove.wordpress.com)
- Daily Prompt: Earworm Birthday (marilyndavies.wordpress.com)
- Earworm (bheehappy.wordpress.com)
Share this:
Categories: #Blogging, #Photography, Computers, Economics, Media, Money, photo, Software, Technology
SERENDIPITY: SEEKING INTELLIGENT LIFE ON EARTH 
My Goodness Marilyn! Well, can’t say I haven’t experienced the panic. However, my server is a telephone company…..it doesn’t go down. Oh, it has problems, but someone will always be there for you. I am backing up my computer with online storage but also with External hard drives. You have scared me. Are things really going that way? Big Brother lurks closely it seems.This post would have been extremely funny unless it is all true. Yes, I am dense, LOL. So, what is the story…………FOR REAL? KEITH
LikeLike
Yes, they really are going that way. You can no longer buy Photoshop. CS 6 was the last version you could buy on DVD. Now, it’s anywhere from $20/month to $50/month to rent its use from Adobe. Online only, no installation. Tough luck for we retired fixed income folks. Microsoft is doing the same thing with office and a couple of other things. So yes, it really IS going that way. Has gone that way. We can’t get a telephone-based service here. We’re too far from the nearest switch, the penalty of living in a rural area. Cable sucks. It beats out nothing by a lot, but any of the telephone-based services are better. The technology is better. We are heading into a world where we will be hard put to keep hold of our own stuff. I have a lot of external hard drives. I back everything up in multiple locations. Last night, when everything was down, I could at least edit photos and read whatever books were already downloaded. I buy music on CD, not downloaded. But eventually, we will lose the battle. The “cloud” is the world’s biggest best boondoggle yet. And it’s just starting. Wait until you see where it goes. It’s gonna be … wow. Really.
LikeLike