It's always something, and it always costs money ...

     So Friday PM, I tired of listening to the Adventures of Balloon Boy, the travails of the White House vs. Fox News Channel and Limbaugh vs. Everybody Else and I shut down all the electronic media and went and started reading a book, a novel, on the invasion of Ireland by Germany during WW2.
     Predictably, it bogged down somewhere after the third in-depth description of mine-sweeping tactics and I fell asleep.
     Woke up to discover that I no longer had Internet access. None, nada, zip, zero access anywhere, not on any of the five computers hooked up in da Manse by LAN or Wireless.
     So I went to the Office and looked at the modem and saw...no lights.  With computer stuff, no lights is usually a bad thing.  Did all the right stuff, unplugging and re-plugging, rebooting, checking connections and still, no lights.
     To my eternal credit, I didn't panic.  I did call Mrs. A, who was still at work, and she promptly took charge.  God, I love her kind of woman!  In a heartbeat, she had us on a conference call with some guy in Bombay Mumbai who wisely worked through his handbook, practicing his English as he went, and told us that the modem was boned.
     I kinda knew that because there were no lights.  I made him laugh with a cruel joke about two Pakistani's walking into a bar and being murdered by Al Quaeda for using alcohol, he gave us a local number to call for reference to a place where we could get a new modem (ours was not, of course, covered under warranty) and we went on to the next step.
     That involved Mrs. A bolting to the store to get the new modem before they closed and me opening a beer and watching the end of Monk, Psych and part of an episode of Criminal Minds.  Life is good when you're almost retired (as long as the TV works and cable is up).
     Several beers later Mrs. A arrived at the disaster scene and plugged the new modem in, got the Main System up and online but not the wireless satellites.  That'll happen later today.
     I'd ask here why life is so complicated, but all I really did was:
     1. Fall asleep reading.
     2. Almost panic because there was no Internet at my fingertips when I awoke.
     3. Call Mrs. A and ask her to fix it.
     4. Drink beer.
     See what I learned from being in radio for all those years?

(And yes, I know that the image is a wireless router, which we use; I just couldn't find a decent image of a modem)

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