It's your modem, no that modem isn't right either

by Terri Wagner

I love the Internet. I like social media, although I don't really post a lot, I like to see what other people post. I like researching things. I like learning things, I like staying in touch with the church.

That said, I do not like the hardware and completely mystifying operating systems. All I know is that on Friday night while in the middle of a conversation actually two conversations, my FB went wonky. So I refreshed it, and lost it. Oddly though, the other conversation was still going fine. Afraid to do anything, touch anything out of the keyboard, I continued until we said that's it, said enough.

I signed out of that chat and never was able to raise up the Internet beast again. Had no clue what had happened. I called my tech support 24/7 team and got a very nice young man who tried to help me. He finally admitted my modem was ancient, and had probably died. Since my Internet access company has changed hands, and I still had equipment from the old one, I bought that line. Seemed logical.

So on Monday my dad (since I am finally working permanently yahoo) went and got a brand spanking new modem. It had bells and whistles. We plugged in everything and......yep you guessed it....still no Internet. So I called tech support. Got a very nice young man. He put me through the drills, consulted his supervisor...came back and finally said, "I hate to tell you this, but I think the modem is bad even though it's new." Ok fair enough. Lemons happen. I'm not happy but it's reasonable. And frankly entirely in keeping with my luck in life. And of course 10 minutes before the store closes and we are not within 10 minutes to reasonably get there. Another long night of no Internet.

So Tuesday we swamp out the new modems, it lights up like a Christmas tree. But I still can't get on the Internet. We check our two laptops and additional desktop...nothing, nada, zero. So I call tech support. A very nice young man begins to help me. Now I have to give Mr. Las Vegas credit, he hung in there for almost two hours. And when we said goodbye having become bosom buddies well at least it felt that way, all of our computers were up and running and on the Internet.

Still I have to tell ya, my computer is running slower. Is that something serious? Is my computer now too old for the modem?

I hate hardware and operating systems. Can't wait until I can just tell the darn computer to do something like on Star Trek. How about you?