Sunday, December 20, 2020

hell is a place made of computers

My afternoon was rudely jerked out of the noiseless tenor of its way when B. informed me that our tv, on which she was planning on watching something, was nonfunctional. It gave only an error message, and the power light on the DVR, which should be on, was off. Remembering previous occasions, I tried the solution of unplugging various cables from the back of the box and plugging them back in again. No luck.

An unbelievably long wait on hold later (but not nearly so unbelievably long as the subsequent session with the cable co. technician, so I guess it evens out), the tech decided to try remotely resetting our router, which provides all our electronic service except, fortunately, the phones. It hasn't usually been necessary to get into this with previous tv problems, which is fortunate because the tv is downstairs and the router box is upstairs with our computers, to which it's more intimately connected. This turned our end of the phone call into a two-person job.

Anyway, all the resetting succeeded in doing was in disconnecting our ethernet-wired computers from the internet. The wi-fi still worked, however. Eventually we got an in-person technician appointment for two days later and gave up.

After dinner, however, I tried again. I figured out how to manually reset the router (which I hadn't done since the previous box, which worked differently, was replaced) and, after not much more than the usual amount of grumbling from the system, the ethernet connections came back. Then I explored further behind the tv set and discovered that the real cause of the original problem was a plug elsewhere in the system that had been loosened by the intervention of a cat.

So after much expenditure of time and effort we are back where we were. You know, we have cats because life would be so much more boring without them.

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