@%!$ technology

Saturday night, the thunderstorms started moving through. They weren’t bad here, but there was this one lightning strike somewhere close by…

And our Intertubz connection became a notwork (rather than a network).

I tried all my usual troubleshooting methods and got nowhere. We swapped over to iPads hot-spotted to our iPhones with their unlimited data plans and figured it would be fixed by the next morning.

No, no it wasn’t. And a call to the service provider’s tech support number said a widespread outage was detected near our location and it would be 8 PM that evening before it would be repaired. No big deal, it was Sunday and we were busy. Late that evening it was back to the combination of iThings, because it wasn’t fixed.

Monday morning, the phone announces all is well. Our Intertubz connection wasn’t included in “all”. So I waded through voicemail hell and got Enrique with an atrocious Indian accent on the line. He tried, but I was off his script. We booked a service call for today (Tuesday).

We lucked into a really great tech. He tracked it down to a lightning arrestor that had actually, for the first time in my experience, actually arrested lightning. Of course, I understand that it stopped a lightning-induced surge on the cable, but still. For now, it’s replaced by a barrel connector and I’m going to find the exact same part and replace it. I am, however, a bit embarrassed that I didn’t check it myself.

The deceased will be memorialized on a plaque. It deserves recognition.

Yeah, this one is on me. I installed it just ahead of the cable modem. I’m glad I did because their lightning arrestor…didn’t. For once, the $15 part protected the $150 part. Plus I didn’t get charged for the service call (as far as I know) and I got a free upgrade to a 500 Mbps connection.

Occasionally, things work out.