You might not guess it, but I've been almost totally offline since Friday night, and then my telephone was out for a while last night, too. Bummer! All because I took an offer from Qwest (which I have called
Qworst) to upgrade my Internet to the super-duper very most fastest service. And get two months free, which was the real selling point. My finances at this point in time are such that saving 50 bucks on Internet service looks very good, indeed.
So the evening of the day I made this arrangement, my Internet connection started going wonky. Nothing changed except I couldn't get a few critical websites, like Netflix or - brace yourself - LOLcats! Oh, noes! I limped along as best I could, doing essential stuff, but by Sunday withdrawal started setting in ~
I ended up taking my laptop to the library, where it worked perfectly on their public wireless. So that saved me from taking it in to the computer hospital for a virus scan. Nothing to do but tough it out until the
Day of the Upgrade, which was yesterday. About 2 pm I couldn't stand it anymore, so I headed out - yes, I took my computer to the library, and got caught up on LOLcats and everything else I was missing. When I noticed I felt much better after an hour-long Internet fix, I knew it: I'm hooked.
Returning home after some errands, it was time to check the upgrade. All the lights on my modem said GO, but when I plugged in, rebooted, and linked up my computer, guess what - same old same old. The instructions did say something about reconfiguring my modem, but when I tried to do it myself - same old same old. Time to call tech support: Oh, noes - my phone is out!!!! Get out the cell phone, which I hardly ever use, call for phone repair, call tech support. 90 minutes or so later - whew, my computer is connected and zipping along with my 7 megs or gigs or whatever speed I have. The tech support lady laughed along with me when I was like, Wowza! at the connections I was getting.
And, the phone repair tech was on the job first thing this morning. It took some doing, but everything is copacetic now, and I have both my phone going and my Internet working. So I feel like I'm part of the world again ~

image by
Randall Munroe via wikimedia.org
Disclosure: To fully depict my Internet-sphere from the above picture, you'd have to replace "MySpace" with Etsy-HuffPost since those are the biggest chunks of forum time I waste, er, spend. Put Facebook where "Friendster" is on the map; that's about right for me. There's no Twitter on the map, which is okay because I don't use it; but there's no LOLcats, either, and that's a big oversight :) But you get the ides. And since I was able to get YouTube during my enforced time-out, I was fairly well surfing that gulf!
Another disclosure: I stopped with the "Qworst" a long time ago, and even with this recent glitch, I'm not going back there. Let's face it, the Internet is complicated! The folks who came on board to help me out with this swtichover really did the job. And if all their customers are irate like me when I called tech support last night, it's job I sure wouldn't want. So thanks, Qwest, for the service - and I hope I don't have to call you again for a long, long time!