It's Complicated

Why is everything so complicated? It seems like everything I do these days is way more complicated than it should be. Am I getting stupider or is everything around me getting more complex? Even creating this file was more complicated than I imagined it would be and that was when it was only two words long. I saved it as a word file but forgot to change from the default name. So I had to attempt changing the name three times and finally close the program before I could change the name and proceed with what I was doing which was writing a blog called “It’s Complicated”. The problem is, that doesn’t surprise me at all.


My wife is a very busy person at work and routinely brings work home to do at night. To get this work done she needs to be online. This tends to complicate things if I also have to get online to do anything at night. Her employer thoughtfully agreed to purchase her a laptop to have at home to alleviate tying up our home computer. This should help to uncomplicated things. Right? Well, now we needed something called a wireless router to make all of this work. OK, they bought the laptop, we can buy the router. Why, I don’t know, our home computer worked just fine without a router, but whatever, it’s no big deal. So we go buy a router at the neighborhood router store. When I get it home I call my friend the computer guy. He does a lot of IT work. I ask him if setting up a wireless router on my home computer is going to be complicated. “No” he says,”just hook it up, follow the instructions, accept the defaults and it should be fine.” I hope I’m not getting to techy here but bear with me. The first thing they tell me to do is to unplug the ETHERNET cable on my modem and plug it into the router or something to that effect. The thing is, on MY modem I’m not using an ETHERNET cable I’m using a USB cable.  Ya see, on MY modem, when we first got cable Internet years ago, the ETHERNET thing wouldn’t work but the Time Warner guy said “no problem we’ll just hook it up with a USB cable and see if that works. And it did. But now I have router and there is no place to hook up a USB cable on my router. So here I am years later with this ETHERNET thing biting me in the ass. So…I look through my drawers and finally find the ETHERNET cable that was left over from the cable hookup. (Just to clarify, I looked through my DESK DRAWERS not MY drawers. This should be obvious but in these complicated times if guys can run around with bombs in there underpants, I guess it’s not to far fetched to think Snappybob carries spare ETHERNET cables in his underwear. We’ll save that for another blog). Anyway, so I hook my modem up with the ETHERNET cable just to see if it will work now since this is not the original modem. No dice. It still don’t work, but by now I have my IT buddy over and he says it all points to a bad modem. Great, now I need to drive to the Time Warner Saturday Afternoon Flying Circus and swap out my modem. After standing in line for 30 minutes listening to the counter lady scream like a prison guard “NEXT,... PAYMENT ONLY…….NEXT, ...EQUIPMENT ISSUES ONLY…..NO RUNNING PLEASE. I finally swapped my modem for a brand spanking new one. I take it home, hook it up, YES, we have Internet and, with an ETHERNET CABLE. GLORY BE TO GOD ON HIGH. Not so fast, Even though I have Time Warner digital phones, for some reason, I have to have my old analog phone line plugged into the modem or my phones don’t work. So I look on the back of the modem and guess what? Can you guess? I don’t see any place to plug the STUPID PHONE LINE!!!! I call my IT buddy since he went home when I left to go to TW and he says to look real good on the left side of the back of the modem. I see a sticker that says something about telephones and some other techy nerdy stuff I don’t understand. I pull off the sticker and underneath is phone jacks. Two phone jacks. Of course they don’t work. Two phone jacks that don’t work. So, I know what I must do now. I need to call my old friend Rusty, Rusty works for Time Warner at their help desk, he lives in Pakistan. He has a part time job at Fruit of the Loom sewing bombs in jockey shorts. Nice guy. Anyway after about half an hour of Rusty amusing himself by having me perform cable switching stunts under my desk where my PC sits he decides it’s break time and maybe he needs to just schedule a service call. Perhaps I’ll have my phone service back in a week or so. Oh well, we still have the cell phones. Let’s just get the router thing working. Remember the router? So I hook the router up just like the instructions say following the step by step program on the supplied CD. Of course the router doesn’t work. Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think that this thing was going to work right out of the box for me. OK, so I look this company up on the Internet, Cisco BTW, and see that they have this live tech chat help line. When I get hooked up with the chat line it says that they will be with me shortly, I am #29 in line. At this point I think, good, and I go and get a beer from the fridge. When I get back I see that now I am 27 in line. I sit there for about an hour chill’in an watching my number gradually decrease. At one point I look at the screen and see that I am #7. Getting close! The next screen I see says “Sorry, but chat tech help is not available at this time. Please check back later.” Nooooooooo! Nooooooooo! This can’t be happening!. I get back in and try it again. Now I am #29 again. Just then, I heard a harp playing in the background, a miracle has happened. On my screen I see these words. “ Hello my name is Chad, how can I help you”. CHAD! CHAD! IS IT YOU! I sobbed like an over melodramatic soap opera star. Me and Chad chatted back and forth for two solid hours. I would chat to him, he would chat back to me, I would holler to my wife. “Are you online now?” “No, still nothing.” We chipped away at it diligently changing codes and changing settings until finally we were online via a radio signal emanating from this wireless router. It just substantiates what I already knew. What’s ‘plug and play’ for most folks is going to be ‘beat and pound’ for me. I have seen this scenario played out over and over in my life. Things rarely go any other way. That’s just my life. It’s Complicated.



Bye

South Texas Winter

It looks like we are in for another winter blast in a few days. The local media will make a veritable circus out of it. THE 2010 WINTER BLIZARD EVENT. The ice, the snow, the sleet, the sand on the freeways and all of the ICE RELATED freeway accidents. Don’t forget the THREE P’s. Plants, Pets and Pipes? How about Paranoid, Preposterous and Pandemonium? I heard the weather nerd on TV talking about how much snow we might get. He had that same look in his eyes as that guy who used to sell Sham-Wows and Mister Microphones on late night TV. I never expect it to snow around here because the only time it DOES snow is when nobody sees it coming. Around here if it gets cold enough to snow it’s because the skies are clear and if it clouds up enough for precipitation it stays just above freezing and we wind up with that ugly sloppy mess that is typical south Texas winter.

Sometimes it doesn’t even get cold at all. We go from hot, hot summer to springtime / fall for about 5 months and then back to summer. Here lately with no rain in all that time either. I can always predict Texas summers. Hot and dry, then dry and hot and then it gets hot and dry again for a while. Predicting winters? I gave up. I’ve sat in deer blinds in November and hosed myself down with insect repellents mixed with sweat and then a few weeks later had to break the ice on the water troughs so that the cows could get drink. I’ve skinny dipped on Padre Island in October and shoveled snow out of my driveway in January. OK, I only shoveled snow from my driveway once in my lifetime and probably will never have to do it again as long as I live here but I DID do it once. I had the most fun on my surfboard that winter day than I ever had on any summer day.

I don’t know about you but I’m going to be packing in supplies for this weekend. I need to bring everything it takes to make a big pot of Chile and a weekend supply of hot toddies. But I didn’t just step off the bus into south Texas yesterday. I’ll also be sure to get some ribs for the BBQ and some Bloody Mary and Margarita mix and we’ll see how things go. So Old Man Weather, what’s it going to be? Are you going to have the chills or a fever?

Ya’ll Keep your Mittens handy just in case.

Bye