Technology Bites the Big One
In the interests of full disclosure, it must be revealed that I am a techie. I have been employed in Information Technology for more than twenty-five years. So those of you reading this blog will understand the depth of my pain and anguish when I say that technology bites the big one. There is no rhyme nor reason for things to go ker-flooey (that’s a technical term, by the way) in the middle of the night. Yet that is EXACTLY what happens. And it doesn’t happen when you’ve got all the time in the world. No, it always happens at the worst possible time, and often, under the worst possible circumstances.
Today, my home network decided to kick the bucket. I have a cable modem, a wireless router, a switch, a server, a desktop, three laptops, a network storage device, and two printers. When the network goes down, it ain’t no picnic, as my old man used to say. Troubleshooting the problem isn’t the hard part. It’s crawling around on my hands and knees, tracing wires, unplugging connections, and then testing what I’ve reconfigured. Ten minutes of this is enough to make a saint spitting mad. An hour of it will drive you to a homicidal fury. To put things in perspective, I’ve spent the better part of the last two days troubleshooting my wired and wireless connections. It has been, shall we say, difficult. It would have been easier if the router (the ultimate cause of all the trouble) had simply up and died. But no, that was too simple. It had to do the long, slow, lingering type of death - the kind where it flickers back to life for hours on end, only to slip, gasping, into black oblivion.
Today, I pulled the plug and am now connected directly to my cable modem. A new, better, faster and stronger router is on its way, and I can only hope its life span is a wee bit longer than the last one.
Wish me luck, boys and girls. It’s going to be a long couple of days.
