That 70's Day

Let's see, it's been and interesting and fun couple of days for me, relearned to live in the days before internet and cell phones. For a day at least.

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The last couple of days my internet has been sporadically going on and off. I got the new modem and it worked for a day or so and then went kaput again. So I called Comcast, again, and scheduled an appointment for today for them to come out and look at it, sometime between 8am and noon. At 10 the internet comes back on, and I'm thinking "Great! Now the cable guy is going to get here and it's going to be working fine." He gets here about 45 minutes later and the cable is still working, so he starts checking it. He checks it out back, let's out a whistle and tells me that the decibels (or something like that) are supposed to run between -5 and +5, and will tend to cut out completely at -15. I was running at -14.4. He also told me that the ratio of errors-to-bits should be 1 in a billion, I was running at 1 in a thousand. He opened up the little box on the back of the house, removed some capacitor looking thing, hooked up his gizmo again, and let out another whistle. Bad capacitor thing, bad, bad capacitor thing. The cable is running at about +9 without it. Now that that is all replaced I'm still running above the +5 mark at the modem, which is very good. Now I've got one foot back in the new millineum.
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Yesterday I was at school starting to set up my classroom. Got there just in time to go out to lunch with the whole gang and then came back to work on my new room. It's summer, nobody is supposed to be in the building, so when I ran upstairs to get some stuff from my techie room, I left the door open. With my personal and my school cell phone sitting on my desk. I was supposed to meet Adele at 3:45 to go see the Simpson's Movie (two thumbs up) and at 3:30 I start packing up to leave. Um, where's the cell phones? Nowhere. In a panic I heaqd down to the office, borrow Tessa's cell phone and start calling mine. Some kid, my guess was 9 or so, answers, mumbles some stuff and hangs up. Great. Call the other phone. Same thing. Double Great. By now it's almost 4:00 and I don't even know Adele's number to call her and tell her what's going on. First things first, I call Qwest to cancel my phone, they were incredibly helpful, they even called South Salt Lake Police to make the report, and let me know how to claim my phone with their insurance and get a new one. Then I have to call Verizon to let get my school number shut down. Now it's almost 4:30 and I just know Adele is all pissed off at me for standing her up. So I look up her parent's number in the phone book, call her mom, get her cell number and then call her. She's not mad at all, she figured something like this had happpend when she called my number and got a 9 year old, who just mumbled something and hung up. First time she called she thought I might have been at Danny's house and either Josh or Dylan had been messing with the phone, but after the third time she figured I would have gotten it from them by then. Well, the phone company is sending me a new phone, it'll get here within 3 days. Until then I'm using one of the counselors cell phones.

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So, I got a reminder of what it was like before the days of cell phones and the internet. Nobody (except Danny, because his cell was the one number I could remember) could call me, I didn't have to come home and check my e-mails, and blogging was completely out of the question. Hmmmm, actually it wasn't that bad of a day........