Saved by 'Junior'?

My internet connection is back! And so am I. Thank you all for your kind comments and sticking with me during my absence. Don’t ask me what went wrong, because I guess it was one of these IT mysteries that happen for no reason at all. 

On Wednesday evening, after coming home from the office, the first thing I did was to switch on my computer, hoping that the internet connection had miraculously returned … but it hadn’t. So I changed into some comfortable clothes and slippers, poured myself a cool beer and dialled the dreaded telephone number of my internet provider. I went through the usual number pushing and was put on hold … Not for long though. At first I was surprised, but then I remembered that the major Belgian call centres had signed a SLA (meaning ‘lettuce’in Dutch/Flemish!!!) a.k.a. Service Level Agreement with the government and customer associations), promising a waiting time of maximum 5 minutes.

Spring (is) was in the air.
A cold spell (with frost and snow on Wednesday) is coming.

The girl on the other end of the line asked a lot of questions, tested my telephone line and confirmed that everything was working as it should. At her request I ran to and fro my laptop checking whether there was any improvement. There wasn’t. After ten minutes, I could feel she was getting desperate. “Hold the line, please”, she asked and I was treated to the same dull waiting tune again. She hadn’t said what the next step was. Was she checking another technical device? Was she asking advice from a colleague? Had she given up? Or was she attending to another caller who had been hanging on for 5 minutes?

I’ll never know the answer, because after another 10 minutes a man picked up the phone and enquired how he could help me. I repeated the whole story. Luckily he came up with some news possible solutions. Apparently he had been briefed by the girl about my problem and was going through the second part of the ‘procedure’, probably called ‘desperate cases’. He was very helpful, I must admit, but when he started saying that I should surf to the technical page of my modem and check all 13 available channels – I was currently on channel 3 – I couldn’t help chuckling. Surf to the internet page of my modem? Using what? A surfboard??!! He was kind enough to give me the identification number of the connection, making it easier for me.

If changing channels didn’t help I should change the modem position in the room, because – according to my contact – the waves that the modem was emitting (and it was, according to him) could easily be redirected by an object obstructing their passage. “Have you repainted your living room recently”, he enquired. I beg your pardon! Had my internet guy suddenly turned into an interior decorator? Apparently there had been a customer who, after repainting his living room with a metal paint, had lost his internet connection … Oh well, why not.

As a last solution he offered the possibility of changing the modem (for free), but first I needed to test all the other options. I doubted that there was something wrong with the modem, because my digital television which runs on the same modem, was working. I thanked the man for his help, and sat down to think for a while. How could I check the channels if I had no internet connection? Then I remember that I had an old internet cable somewhere; from the time I lived in my former apartment and still had a desktop computer. I dug it up from some unpacked moving box in the cellar, got out young ‘Junior’ (my net book, remember). The cable connection seemed to work and I was able to surf to the required paged. Checking all 13 channels took a lot of time, but didn’t offer a solution. So I safely set the connection on channel 3 again and went to bed, ‘internet-less’.

The whole situation stayed status-quo, until last night when  I turned on the laptop, in a last desperate attempt before picking up a new modem today. And yes, there it was … my wireless connection, as strong as ever!

P.S. Why didn’t I use my internet cable connection all this time? Simply because it required lying flat on stomach with young ‘Junior’ connected to the modem … not a very comfortable position at my age.