Disaster Averted!

Saturday night as I was moving from the lower level of our house to the upper level where the bedrooms are, I heard my husband talking. It is unusual for him to be on the phone at 10:30 at night, but his voice was calm so I knew it could not be an emergency. As I crossed past the doorway I saw him holding up his ipad and realized he must be talking to tech support somewhere and he finally blew out his ipad. The thing has not left his grubby little hands since he got it, he says, from work. I might be concerned that he loves it more than me if it weren't for the little affair I have had going on with my Roomba since Christmas. Anyway, my usual routine on Saturday nights is to read through listserve group postings ( I know, my life rocks, shut up). So I went and fired up my old and boring (but reliable!) laptop and clicked.... and clicked...... and nothing internet would come up.

NOTHING INTERNET WOULD COME UP

And so I tuned back in to my husbands side of the conversation and heard him saying " I know it's the weekend so probably nothing can be done until Monday right?". Then he says "well yeah, we pretty much use our internet for everything so we need it". He wasn't talking to tech support for his ipad/girlfriend, he was talking to the company that gets our internet signals to us!

Oh my unholy hell, our internet was out. OUT! Thoughts raced through my head like there were Nascar drivers in there. What will I do? It's only 10:45! If I can't read group postings I can..... ugh, I can't read blog posts either! If I can't do that, well maybe I'll go to bed early. If I start my bedtime routine early I can...... omg, my fish tank! My Tap Fish app, the fish will die if I can't feed them and I have to have an internet connection to feed them! My fish...... oh NO what about my Tap Ranch app? All those crops are going to die and I will lose all that (real on the internet) money and I could even lose the farm!

I was ready to start driving around town looking for a 24 hour Starbucks that might have their wifi going. Or something! I needed a signal people, a signal! To save the fish! And my mind!

What a disaster this has turned out to be! My internet, my beloved internet! What about..... what about..... oh supercrap all my friends live in there! Now I won't have any friends either? Somebody needs to call 911 about this, its unreal! Maybe this is a dream.

I had started to try to calm down and realized I was just going to have to live like Laura Ingalls for the next couple days and then the worst blow of all. I was going to read a book like Laura would, you know, and milk a cow or something and I remembered I had just finished the second book from "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" trilogy and had not yet downloaded the final book to my nook.

So I had nothing to read either. I mean come on, what was I going to do here now, talk? Out loud? To who? Seriously, The Husband and I have texted each other from the same room to talk about the kids so they can't hear us! Dang, I thought, maybe I can find one of those old timey books-on- paper.

I know people complain about technology taking over lives. The things that were supposed to save us time have turned out to make us work harder and longer. But  you know, I think people have always complained about new-fangled things. When the phone was invented, people complained that you wouldn't see others in person anymore. That communication would be compromised and would start the decline of civilization. I wonder if the ancient Egyptians griped at each other when they invented hieroglyphics. Now the spoken story would be lost, useless. Storytelling as a treasured pastime would become extinct if you could just trot into a cave or pyramid and read the wall yourself.

Anyway, it turned out that the keepers- of -the -tubes would be able to come out the next day to fix our whatever hoosie that was not working right and ruining my life. The Husband decided to waltz his self down to the box of important signals and turned it off. Then he turned it back on and it was fine and has been ever since. I downloaded the last book in the Millenium series (highly, highly recommended). Disaster averted. PHEW!