Late yesterday afternoon, the internet connect suddenly stopped working. No explanation. No fanfare. Just stopped. The little icon in the menu bar showed an exclamation point where the Airport signal normally is. Any effort to surf the web lasted approximately 7 seconds before the ! showed up again. Solidly displayed in front of the signal, it was a glaring reminder of our inability to go online. Suddenly, I remembered 4-5 email messages that needed immediate response. There were at least half a dozen bits of information that I desperately needed to research. And of course, I had just gone to the pharmacy to buy a bottle of lotion so that I could take its picture to illustrate my last post. Upload a photo? “Not a snowball’s chance. . . ,” as they say.

It made for a pretty dreary evening. We were forced to turn from our obsession with computering to a quiet evening of reading, dinner and conversation. Okay. . .these things are pretty normal for us, so it wasn’t really much of a hardship. But the interesting thing is how that “roadblock” made us feel.  We all imagine that we are doing what we want, when we want—but when we can’t, it really gets our dander up.

Since it was dusky, there was nothing to do but call it a day. Our internet connection is through an antenna installed on the post of a car port. In the past, Emerson has jiggled a line or two and the connection was re-established, miraculously. That could be the case again, but we wouldn’t know until tomorrow, in the light of day. Especially since we’d had a couple of days of rain, a visit to the connection box was inadvisable. At dusk, the possibility of encountering an undesirable creature is much higher. No one wants to be startled by a leaping lizard, a scurrying mouse or maybe even a porcupine. So morning daylight is better.

I picked up the International Herald Tribune newspaper and started reading. Doping in bicycling? Mutilations in Afghanistan? Please. Where’s the good news? I laid the paper aside and picked up my latest read, Buy-ology, about the psychology behind the purchases we make. Again. . .a bit too heavy for the evening.

So we rustled up some dinner, lit some candles and eased into the night. Sleep filled the hours until morning and we awoke refreshed and ready to tackle the connection box. My job was to stand near the antenna and alert Em if and when the light pattern changed.

“Now?” he asked.

“No.”

“Now.”

“No.”

“Now?”

“Yes. Something changed. There’s an orange light flashing next to a solid green light.”

“Well, then let’s go in and see if we can go online.”

We practically jogged back to the house and I opened my laptop. The Airport icon did NOT have that pesky exclamation mark. I clicked on Google and up came my homepage. Connection restored!

“What exactly did you do at the box?” I asked.

Emerson shook his head and sighed, “I just jiggled the line.” Everyone has gifts and talents. Apparently, one of his is that of  an expert wire jiggler. Who would have ever guessed?

Posted on August 10, 2010

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