Routed!

 

Routed! A Several Day Tech Nightmare Encompassing Calls and Trips

Day One-

I’ve been routed. Upended. Totally ejected from my comfort zone.

The cozy if predictable blanket of a daily routine safely cosseted in virtual reality, one in which you turn on your computer and just connect up, was gone. The familiar, colorful google logo that usually appears, so evocative of an imagined and mythical childhood that assures you all is well with the world, no matter the truth, failed to pop up; the prospect of aimlessly surfing the net, no matter how pointless or irrelevant the websites, no longer an option.

 Ugh! Routed

 No one ever wants to wake up, press the button and find that horrifyingly simple yet heartless message in uninspiring black and white, flatly informing all ye who enter here, to this particular, oncoming, technological hell, that despair truly does await because you no longer are part of Cyberland, and therefore have no internet. Also in the offing are disbelief, denial (there must be a worldwide power outage, this could not be simply my computer!), frustration, annoyance, wasted hours, endless, truly irritating phone calls to reps on the other side of the globe, or worse, trips to stores, because you are disconnected.

 And when this unsettling, hugely unfair upending happens, quite often it’s the very router itself that’s the culprit. This previously dependable dispenser of hypnotic, virtual wave lengths, an item you purchased a quarter of a century ago, that took hours of fiddling and a technician to set up, had seemed immortal. Oh, the betrayal. How can I now use my phone while watching TV, reading and washing dishes at the same time without using up all The Cheap Plan data???

 Admittedly the little contraption now is ancient technology and barely slips through walls, but for some inexplicable reason mainly having to do with really bad memories of the initial installation long, long ago, its quiet, ineffective little presence still managed to falsely convey that all was as it should be in the universe.

 Until it wasn’t . . .

 (To be cont’d. . . .)