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666 [Apr. 20th, 2018|12:40 pm]
So Monday morning there was no Internets, and the power light on my router was flashing red. I called AT&T and "Steve" (or was it "Shiva"?) from India told me that the flashing red light meant the router was dead. So the nephew ordered a new router from Amazon (as I have no Amazon account of my own) which arrived Wednesday, but I was unable to configure it, called AT&T again and this time got an American tech guy who couldn't pronounce English as well as "Steve" ("or "Shiva") from India had (I suspect the the American tech guy belonged to some cult that had taken a vow to avoid using consonants) and in the end he was unable to figure it out either. The router was, you see, not standard AT&T issue.

So the next day another nephew, who visits the nearby semi-metropolis daily, was dispatched to the AT&T store there (the one in my backwater was permanently closed some years ago) to purchase a standard AT&T issue router. But by the time he got it here last night the AT&T tech support center was closed. It used to be available 24 hours a day, but it now is open only from 7:00 AM to 11:00 PM... Central time. This leads me to believe that the AT&T has contracted out its tech support system to a convenience store in Toledo, but whatever. The price of AT&T Internets service goes up every year, though not as rapidly as bonuses for AT&T executives, so they clearly don't have enough money to waste on frivolities such as customer tech support. I understand. Corporate personhood is tough in an America where Bernie Sanders has not yet been officially waterboarded.

So this morning I was finally able to call the Toledo 7-11, and "Trey" (who, judging from his accent, is Mexican, and therefore sufficiently fluent in English to be comprehensible) was finally able to get me reconnected. The odd thing is that I had tried to connect last night using the configuration web site that was given to me in the instruction manual for the router, but that web site didn't recognize my password. This morning "Trey" had me close that browser page and go to the page provided not by AT&T but by Netgear, the router's manufacturer, and that worked. It is a bit puzzling that Netgear would not have the link to their own, functional web page in the instruction manual, but instead directed me to an AT&T page that didn't work, but, again, whatever. It's technology, and Internets, and the manual was thus probably just cobbled together out of whatever was left laying around by the previous tenant of the building Netgear's manual-writing department now occupies.

So I am at last reconnected to the Beast, and my pathway to damnation is open once again. I don't think I'll try to catch up with everything the Beast has been up to over the four days I was gone. Once, when I was younger, I had the energy for such tasks, but these days I'll be lucky to catch up with my email, let alone all those web sites I regularly visit. As the old saying goes, Hell can wait.

[User Picture]From: flying_blind
2018-04-22 01:03 am (UTC)
I remember there were things called "newspapers" that a guy would throw into your yard every day, and they had words and pictures in them but they didn't have to be plugged in to anything!

About the only thing that could make them stop working was if they got rained on (happened frequently in winter) or caught fire (very rare unless you set them alight yourself.)

You could also put them on the floor to let your cat vomit a hairball onto them. I don't recommend letting your cat vomit a hairball onto your computer.
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