Internet

Earlier this spring, my family and I got a new modem. Like so much else in our big red Victorian house, the previous one could best be described as “ancient.” We may have inherited it from the previous owners; I'm not clear on that point, and it's a moot one anyway. However, I'll allow that if we did inherit it, so did they – probably from whoever built the house, back in 1873. The relevant point is that we're renovating. The place has been swarming with contractors for about a year, we've replaced the dishwasher, we've purchased a new washer and dryer, our old water heater has gone to the great basement in the sky, and the cats even do their business in a recently purchased litter box. Despite the fact that half the new appliances have worked worse than their predecessors, my dearly beloved grandfather decided it was the modem's turn.

We've had hardly a day of reliable internet ever since. This bites, because all three of us do a lot of business on the web, and Mum and I have friends and, in my case, a significant other thousands of miles away. I'll be tooling along applying for jobs, working on the blogs, etc and Mum downstairs paying bills and suddenly, splchhht!, no more internet. I think it's giving my poor girlfriend an ulcer. Mum's bank account is losing weight at an alarming rate, thanks to the ISP-tapeworm feeding off of it.

All right, so that was unfair. The customer service people who have been out here to work on it have been almost universally awesome, especially Bob* the Nerd, with whom I keep having enthusiastic and alarmingly geeky conversations about Lord of the Rings, and who carries the responsibility for naming our wi-fi network Aragorn. I told him it might not be a bright idea to name something we want to stop arbitrarily quitting on us after someone who spent decades off in the wilderness avoiding his birthright. He told me the other option was Barad-Dur, thanks to the modem's long, black, vaguely ominous shape, and we both agreed that walking into Mordor every time we want to use the study miiiiight be a bit much.

Unfortunately, we can't just have Bob out here to drink coffee and talk about fantasy novels. We have to pay him, and we have to do so to fix something that we all use intensively on a daily basis. Bob has come to the house three times now, and other technicians, who were nice but not half as memorable, three more. One of the more recent ones, over a week ago, did something or other that we thought had finally convinced the accursed thing to behave, right up until it went out once more on Wednesday night, not with a bang or a whimper but with a sullen display of its electronic middle finger.

It went past infuriating and straight into ludicrous, at that point. Who on earth has the energy to stay frustrated for weeks at a time? Definitely not this guy One might as well laugh. Internet going on vacation every Wednesday? Really?

Laughter, however, may be the best medicine for bedraggled spirits, but it does jack-all for wi-fi or pocketbooks, and thus with great passion I finish this shining beacon of linguistic brilliance:

Dear internet service provider: get your crap together! As of right now, it's late Tuesday morning. This time tomorrow, you had better be up and running.

*You know the drill.