When You're Depending on the Internet for Pretty Much Everything...

...and your internet starts having a problem the day before your IT professional husband takes off for far off places, it quickly becomes a problem.  We use the internet for television, we use the internet for music, we use the internet for shopping, we use the internet for getting library books (because we're lazy that way), we use the internet for banking and paying bills, we use the internet for our landline, and we use the internet for, well, surfing the internet...seriously, we use the internet for everything.  When I say "internet problem", I actually mean the internet keeps going down completely, as in, completely not there!!  I tell you, we've become so spoiled, I was looking at my Roku-hooked-up television and asking it, "what do you mean, "Not Connected"?  We were just watching Defying the Nazis on PBS!!!"  (Or, the finale of American Ninja Warrior!!, or that new show The Good Place!! -- it really depends upon which night we're talking about here...)  Trust me, though, it was a PROBLEM.


So, in addition to not whining myself when I discovered we had a big internet problem, I had to be mature and parental when confronted with a teenage daughter who WAS NOT HAPPY about the internet problems. (The internet problem required her to use a lot more data on her phone and her speed was throttled back!!!!)    Interestingly, your son doesn't care--he just uses the internet at his girlfriend's apartment - problem solved.  Sigh.  Anyway, when you discover the problem is, in fact, at your end and NOT at the CenturyLink end, it becomes an annoying problem which YOU have to solve.

Fresh out of the Amazon box--still in cellophane--waiting for Superman.

 Actually, you just tell your husband who is off adventuring in far off lands that there is a BIG INTERNET PROBLEM and he has to fix it...it was in the marriage vows he said all those years ago and adventuring doesn't absolve him of that responsibility.  (No, seriously, it was in the vows...check the fine print.  Never mind that we were married long before the internet was a thing.  The "handle the internet problems" vow is right that after the "fix all the car problems" vow.  Check it out...you'll see that I'm right.)

The cellophane is off and, if you look carefully, you can see my cell phone in the background off to the right and you can see there is an active call on the screen.  This was the part where Superman was starting to tell me what to do.

When you tell your IT professional husband that you're having a problem with the internet, he does magical things from those previously mentioned far off lands, logs into your home modem, verifies the problem is, in fact, on your end (because he's pretty sure you don't really know what is going on with your home network and its three different wifi networks--yes, three!), and jumps onto Amazon and orders you a whiz bang router to solve your problems. 

Apparently this lovely router will have four channels (upgrading from our current three) and will solve the bandwidth hog problems we'd been having before we had the "real" internet problem.

This huge thing arrived on my front porch this morning.  Doesn't it look impressive?  After a brief phone call this evening, it is now powered up and plugged into our modem.  That doesn't mean it is busily solving my internet problem.  That will require Superman to log in and configure it to his liking in the wee hours of my morning, so I will have another night of internet problems, but this, my friends, is the light at the end of the tunnel (or so I'm told!)