The No Internet Blues

Nor no e-mail, neither. (Triple negative there—whichever direction that ends.) 

Last Thursday I couldn’t access either email or the internet here at home. Oh, bother. This has happened before with Comcast, and internet access later comes back, so I gave the problem one of my favorite solutions—I ignored it, hoping it would go away.

 It didn’t. I was off last Friday and had a couple ideas for posts, but all day long—no internet. So Saturday morning I called Comcast and navigated the phone menu (doing my best to keep blood pressure in check) and finally was told there was a high volume of calls and I should opt for a callback later. Fine. So half an hour later they called me back and put me on hold for a bit anyway, promising I could speak to someone … soon. I got a very definitive young man who, upon realizing that I’d come into Comcast from Alamedanet (our local ISP and cable TV utility that Comcast swallowed, shanghaiing us, too) he identified my old Surfboard cable modem by model number and adamantly told me I had to replace it. Either rent one from Comcast or go buy a new one. He guaranteed, aggresively, that this would solve the problem.

I thought to myself that he probably deals with cranky customers all day long, and his emotional, high energy approach was probably both outlet and self-defense.

 I was preoccupied with a project last weekend, but Monday night, after Mrs. O picked me up from BART and our pups from Happy Hound, we went to Best Buy and forked over $90 plus, with tax, for a new Surfboard modem.

 Which I plugged in and didn’t work—but I expected that.

So I called Comcast and spoke to a very earnest young man, probably in Pakistan or The Punjab or The Philippines, who tried for a little over an hour to get me back on line. Much disconnecting and re-connecting of cords, with me reading long gibberishy serial numbers and MAC ID numbers, etc. into the phone, and him repeating it and unplugging cords and re-plugging cords and then him  coming back on and asking me to recite the same, dang, numbers, again. (Sadly, I’m not exaggerating.)

 It didn’t work. We needed a technician. So we scheduled a tech visit this morning, and it turned out my wireless router wasn’t talking the new modem’s language. Or so they claim.  He also said they had made changes to their system that rendered the other modem obsolete–do you think someone might have let us know this could happen? Rather than just cutting us off and leaving us to hang without access for almost a week? Anyway, I’m back, and newly enamored of the Internet.

 Really. Once you get used to finding crap online, it’s a nuisance when you can’t. Looking words up on Merriam-Webster, checking ESPN to see who won last night’s baseball game, looking up TV listings or arcane info on who some movie starred, all that stuff.

 I’ve got several items I’ve meant to post on, including finally posting honestly, per the Honest Scrap tags of my fellowbloggers. I’ll get there—honesty is just proving more elusive than I thought.

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In the meantime: my exploding Coke can. I’m not a big soft drink guy. But every so often I want the mild carbonated caffeine-sugar water buzz, usually to get some task done, with artificial flavoring and Latin-named chemical compounds and preservatives for pickling my internal organs. We have a bunch of sodas down in the basement left over from some party. So I got a Coke, and tried to open it, and the ring broke off. I took a fork and tried to punch open the can, and it exploded open with a bang!

Surprised the hell out of me. I stared at the flap blown outward for a couple seconds, wondering if it was safe to drink the explosive beverage:

 

  Aw, hell, I’m not a kid imperiling my whole lifetime any more. (Once past 50, you’re over the hump, right?) I drank the thing down. The twitching has mostly subsided now, and I don’t think any permanent damage was done.