Hello, can you hear me? Yes? Thank goodness. I’ve been trapped in the dark ages for the past few weeks. You ask, “How can that be, the dark ages were centuries ago.”
Au contraire my friends. I have been stuck in the ancient past…since the Internet at my house went down a few weeks ago. I never realized how much our lives are now controlled by the World Wide Web.
It started about a week before Christmas. We were all excited because my oldest son was coming out from the mid-west to spend the holidays with me. It has been over 6 years since I had my three sons in the same spot. I bribed my oldest by telling him that we would continue his holiday tradition of having the movie “A Christmas Story” running continuously on our TV for Christmas Day. He was agreeable to the arrangement and decided to fly out.
The week before his arrival, while we were sleeping, the box that brings the life giving Internet into our house died. It was a sudden death. No warning signs, no last gasps of its life coming to an end, it just quit. When we woke up in the morning, we were unaware of the tragedy that had played out in a remote room of our house where this box was located, and started to go about our daily business. To our surprise, we could not. We asked Amazon’s Alexa a question and poor Alexa was stumped. We checked our phones, which rely on our wi-fi signal to bring us daily information and all we got were the spinning circles of death. Our thermostat had a warning that it was no longer connected to the Internet. When we tried the TV, all we saw was a frozen screen shot of the last thing we watched the night before. This is when I decided to check the router and found a red light blazing that meant no connection to the outside world. I didn’t panic and called the service department of our Internet provider.
Our conversation was cordial and I was able to relay to the friendly customer representative the problem we were having. From our representative’s accent I was sure I was speaking to someone located deep in India. She was very nice and put me on hold for a few minutes. When she came back she informed me that they sent a signal to our box and discovered it was dead and needed replacing. Ok, when can they get it fixed? She informed me, 1 to 5 p.m. on Christmas Eve, a week away. That caught me by surprise and I asked if it could be attended to any earlier. I told her I was having guests and I also needed to impart my words of wisdom to my faithful followers and if they were deprived of my witty prose, things could get worse than January 6th. She said she understood and would put in an order to expedite the repair request.
I was not born yesterday, which so many people are happy to remind me, and I figured the request to expedite my repair would be filed under “fairy tales” and I would have to wait until Christmas Eve afternoon. I accepted my fate and spent the rest of the week realizing how depended our lives were on the Internet.
Unfortunately the cell phone signal at our house is not very good. Translated, it’s just like not having wi-fi. We thought we could just do things on our very expensive cell phones but no, again the spinning wheel of death. We were stranded, abandoned and isolated from the rest of the world. It was like “Lord of the Flies,” but with just two people. How did I come to that conclusion? It was when my wife broke my glasses and started calling me Piggy. Should I be concerned?
We had to start turning on and off our lights without the aid of our Alexa device. We had to manually set our thermostat. We could not listen to music, get the news, have our Roomba vacuum the floors or shop for any last minute gifts on-line. It was like being back in the 1990s. I now regret canceling my newspaper subscription back then. What were we going to do, and my sons who grew up with life controlled by the Internet were soon to arrive.
I chose not to tell them our tragic news in hopes they would not run away once they arrived an found out we were a house without wi-fi. They took the news well and settled in for a quiet (I mean really quiet) visit. The day after they arrived was Christmas Eve and we were going to make a trip to visit my sister. I figured by the time we got back everything would be fixed and we could get back to our connected life.
We arrived home in the afternoon and learned that the repairman had not arrived but we still had a couple hours left in the time window that was set. A few hours later, and during our Christmas Eve dinner, I received an email from our provider telling me our repairman would not be there today as scheduled and they rescheduled the visit for the first week of January and thanked me for my patience. Amazing, because I had lost my patience hours ago.
I again called the service department and was again given the exact same speech, word for word, about how the rep was going to put in an expedited repair request. That was when I knew there was no repair rep coming. I had a better chance of Santa Claus really coming down my chimney than having my Internet fixed. There are no small children reading this? I didn’t give away anything?
We soldiered on and still had a very nice Christmas celebration. We used manual timers to cook our turkey. I looked up cook times for dishes in a cookbook instead of asking Alexa. One of my sons had a different cell provider than we did and we were able to get A Christmas Story playing on his phone. It did look a little silly having his phone propped up under our 65” TV while we watched the movie but it was the spirit that counts. At least that’s what I told them. Do you think they bought that?
The next work day I called our Internet provider and canceled our service. When asked why, I calmly explained it was time to call it quits and it wasn’t them, it was me. It worked on an old girlfriend once.
The day after Christmas I was scheduled to take my son to the airport so he could fly back to the mid-west. He received an email on his connected phone telling him his flight was canceled. He re-booked and then that flight was canceled. That went on for about three more flights until Southwest informed him he wouldn’t be able to fly home until the next week. I’m sure they told him they would put in a request to expedite his reservation. Apparently Southwest’s Internet is also down.
Footnote: At the time of this posting my Internet has yet to be fixed. I am forced to sit at Starbucks to post this column. While I’m here I just want to know why don’t they just they call a large drink, large. What is all this Grande, venti and other made up size words. I guess that’s a column for another day. They just called my name. Got to pick up my hot chocolate. Happy New Years.
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