Unreliability, fickleness, irregularity, variability, change .... These are all constants in the ME. As such it should be no great surprise that the Internet stopped at our house last week for no apparent reason. Nor should it be any wonder that my inquiries as to the malfunction are met with confusion, dismay, distress ..... but no solution in sight. After endless calls to the Internet provider, with an agent on the other end walking me endlessly through ISN variations (what does that even MEAN????) and getting me to force log-off 42 times, it was finally determined that I would need a technician on-site to resolve the problem.
Now I am normally a patient woman; Smilin' Vic will attest to that as soon as I start to get the half-crazed look in my eye. But waiting for the phone company to show up here is akin to waiting for the snow to melt in Northern New Brunswick. You know it will happen, it should happen in April, but on a bad year it might not be til nearly June.
So by the time the repairman gets here, the chances are he may well be greeted by a half-rabid, near-mad creature who used to go by the name 'Gypsy'.
Chances are by then I will have gnawed through the upgraded, higher bandwidth, super-performing, ultra-fast fibre-optic cable we had installed a few months ago. I will have done this not out of sheer frustration, but more because it was something to pass the time while I wait for my "lifeline" to be re-installed.
You see, I rely on the Internet for phone calls back home, for e-mail, for all sources of social media. When the Internet is down in the ME, I am down. Granted, I can use mobile access for a few things, but it isn't the most convenient of affairs given that I am working from an iPhone, with a touchpad roughly the size of a credit card.
This week it has also wreaked havoc with my blogging, and I find myself increasingly frustrated with the inability to just sit down comfortably and post at random on a slew of topics of varying degrees of meaninglessness. How dare faulty code or wiring disrupt my litany of rambling and babbling?
So I decided tonight that I would.not let this tiny bump in the road stop me. That I would write about nothing, just to prove a point. And as I sit here, four hours after beginning this post, typing with the help of a toothpick on this teeny tiny iPhone screen, I feel strangely, oddly, wonderfully vindicated.
And a little bit foolish. There's just no way to look cool poking at a phone for that long.
But for now, at least, I don't feel quite so disconnected in the ME.