did you miss me?

[calimac]

No phone, no Web, no Internet
Not a single luxury
Like Robinson Caruso*
It's primitive as can be.

*That's how they pronounced it

Thursday afternoon I came home and discovered our DSL was out and we had no Internet connection. Well, this has happened before, and when resetting it didn't work, I picked up the phone to call tech support, only to find that it wasn't the DSL that was dead, it was the phone line.

A call to Repair on my cell phone - the one with the lousy signal around here, so forget the obvious question - later, I had a twelve-hour window on Friday during which they'd supposedly show up.

And indeed, near the end of that window, and a mere 27 hours after I'd submitted my plaint, I got a call on said cell phone from a technician who said that the problem appeared to be out on the connection to the main line. Shortly thereafter it was fixed, but that's long enough to be without it. Good thing I haven't succumbed to the fad of keeping all my documents on the web.

This was all in the middle of some complicated e-mail exchanges with liveavatar regarding meeting up for a concert, and I didn't want to burden the conversation with TMI about how I had to run down to the public library to check my e-mail. After such patience, the desired conjunction did take place on Friday evening, in a previously unknown location up twisty roads, stumbled over in the dark, with the acoustics of a wine cellar, and cryptically lasting three and a half hours. More on that later.

In the meantime, it is, or was recently, late October, the anniversary of our move to Minnipin Cottage, which meant it was time to clean our alarmingly light-colored carpets, the more so after what the cats have been doing recently. That got done today. This meant a trip to the supermarket to buy assorted red bottles of toxic fluids and rent the carpet cleaner, a machine that looks like a modernist bust of Stalin and sounds like an anemic jackhammer, with an impressive ability to turn clear sudsy water in one compartment into dirty grey water in the other compartment. The carpets even looked a little cleaner, but if there were a chemical that could just change the water color without doing anything else ... well, it doesn't bear thinking of.

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

A bit less than a year ago, we lost Internet service for something over a week. It was astonishing how isolated we both felt. You read (or used to read) about the Internet cutting people off from relationships, but our relationships are greatly supported by the Internet. . . .

[wild-patience.livejournal.com]

What I found most amazing was that the problem was out in the (busy) street, not close to home. Were we the only people affected?