Routed, Part Two

(Some Days afterward. . . .)

I'd been planning to replace the modem for years. When the internet went down once again, and I learned much to my chagrin that no, there was no worldwide or even neighborhood outage for someone else to take care of, and that this calamity basically had to do solely with my own service, it was clear the time had come to update the technology.

The thing was ancient, an original, I could not tell how old it really was but it had outlived several desktops. And unlike the young 'uns, I did not own seventy-two "devices" so was prompted to act fast. The cable place was not that far away,and hopefully this would turn out to be just a small inconvenience. 

So after just having stumbled in the door after hours of chores, with no thoughts whatsoever of ever leaving the house again, at least until the next day, suddenly it was time to jump back into the car. Like all fantasists, I actually saw this event as having an upside and spoke about it to my husband with real enthusiasm.

Isn’t it great? The Optimum location is so convenient! It’s less than fifteen minutes up the road- we’re so lucky.

We'd fallen victim to misplaced, unbridled optimum-ism. So after unloading the packages, making a quick bathroom stop and skipping the tea, we ran back downstairs and headed north again. Miraculously, the store was not crowded. New modem in hand, we sped back home.

OK, annoying for sure, but these things do happen, it will get solved. . . 

It did not get solved. Although the modem was relatively “easy” to replace once you figured out the horrible rubic’s cube tangle of twisted, dusty wires as you crouched uncomfortably on the floor near the back of the computer, there still was no internet. By now we were fully exhausted, soon to feel downright idiotic due to a growing suspicion about our own, incredible stupidity regarding the initial "diagnosis."

It’s not the modem!! Of course It’s not the modem!! Ugh!!! We are soooo stupid!!! It had to be the ROUTER all along. . . .  So, so stupid. It’s not the cable company, or Big Tech,  or magical implements of invisible communication made to self destruct, or outsourcing, or the tactics of unbridled greed designed to confound you into spending more time and money. It’s our own stupidity. . . .

Mercifully the sun still had not set, but the rush hour was bearing down and we were starting to feel slightly crushed by these events. Nonetheless, we jumped back into the car, made our way back up the parkway through now crawling traffic, and stumbled back into the house with a new router.

Great!

Not great, not even good.  As it turned out, this was just the beginning of a new circle of hell. . . .  

A frustrating hour or so later after a long and totally unsatisfying “conversation” with a disembodied cable company voice from possibly halfway round the world (as in, “can you repeat that?” or "say that again" and “I can’t quite hear you” and "we have a bad connection" or ‘what plug?" so "plug goes where???” or “do you have a supervisor” repeated maybe a dozen times to an unintelligible “associate”), we still had not solved the problem and had begun to resort to babbling. Complete, rational sentences now became a thing of the past. How quickly things fall apart!

As evening closed in, having skipped dinner and been totally routed from any glimmer of relaxation or peace, in the end we decided we did not need wireless in the house anyway. Why bother? We spent far too much time in front of screens as it was. What was the point of watching TV, cutting your toenails, making grocery lists and surfing the net on your phone while talking on your landline- and all at the same time- simply to feed a tech addiction. . . . From now on, we only would connect directly, either through the cable via desktop or very sparingly by carefully using phone data, and then only when absolutely necessary. . . .

So when we arrived back at the store three days later, totally defeated, fed up, somewhat disheveled, and extremely pessimistic, there was an incident going on. A customer was screaming at an “associate” at the top of her lungs. She too was disheveled and exuded a kind of hopelessness. We felt her pain. In truth, her crazy actions mirrored our every impulse. If they had threatened to lock us in a cage together with our most horrible fears incarnate at that point, it might not have been worse; while waiting, once again we paid silent homage to Orwell.

A guy at the counter listened wearily to the saga of useless pilgrimages and tearing-out-of-hair “conversations” that no doubt he had heard so many times before, then asked a question:

Did the person you spoke with tell you to turn on the router before installing?

Turn on? 

Person? Phone? Router? Switch? Person? Router? Switch? Turn on?

We were stunned, but not totally surprised. He handed us a shiny new router in a spiffy plastic bag from right off the shelf, with instructions on where the on/off switch was located, and bid us farewell.

Now of course it all seems like a bad dream, but these types of nightmares tend to be recurring, and the PTSD does linger . . . , 

Yes, this can and most likely will happen again, but remember, you are not alone. Just like the pandemic, we are kind of all in it together.