Last night was something of a humdinger. At one point, I actually wondered if one of those Electro-Magnetic-Pulse-thingies had gone off in the vicinity. (You know, Jack Bauer had to deal with one of those once, and how crazy is it that I actually thought of him amidst the chaos that was Last Night’s Electronics Disaster?!)
So, I got home, and JWo and I had some de-lish takeout Vietnamese, and we watched Weeds. I noticed that the DVR (yes, THAT DVR, the DVR of Discontent) showed a bright red “RECORD” and yet when I hit the controls, it showed that it was recording … nothing. And it was whirring a bit. It’s been whirring lately, and I just let it. Whir, little friend. If you explode, we will blame Corporate Time Warner, because well, I already do. I’ve saved you so much on therapy bills! Anyway, James said it had been doing that since he got home, and since the recording log said it was now 100% full, I wisely panicked, because that could only mean one thing was coming: automatic deletion of shows for no reason. So I did what I’d been told last week, unplugged & re-plugged, and let it re-boot. It seemed to do the trick! I felt quite satisfied.
Later, I was watching tv & checking email on James’ laptop, and playing a little “Poppit”, when suddenly his computer froze. Not just the game, the whole kit & caboodle. I turned it off, and rebooted, and began what has become a very tiresome long dance with the devil, because it will. not. reboot. Not in safe mode, not from the recovery CD, it freezes at a certain line of code when you reboot in safe mode with command prompts, I have updated the BIOS, (yes, my network administrator slip is showing), and I have searched the internets for solutions, and so far have been unsuccessful. We have a dead computer, unless I figure out what the magical resuscitation clue is. (It won’t even power on if it’s not plugged in.) So as I was wrangling with that, my cell phone rings.
It’s James. Who is wondering what is going on, and I am thinking, holy moses, does he have a nanny cam on me? No, he’d just been trying to call the house phone, which would ring and ring and ring and ring and ring, with no answering machine. Or, I should point out, any RINGING on my end. Sure enough, the phone is dead.
WELL! We’ve been here before! I know what to do! So I begin. Racing around, upstairs, downstairs, jump up jump up and git down, unplugging power sources and phone cords. But. The corded phones don’t work, either. Hrm. I go to the basement and unplug and plug in the alarm, to make sure it’s not messing with the lines. I test the alarm system, twice. It works, but it also starts beeping at me. Because the landline phone lines aren’t working. (We have layers on the alarm system. I swear, try what you like, asshats, but that alarm is going OFF. With outdoor siren.) So, I call the phone company and immediately explain I have already attempted their foolproof plug-unplug-replug system, and so out to the box we go, in our jammies, at 11 pm, mind you, with a corded phone, a screwdriver, and my cell phone. Nope. None of the lines work.
As the very cordial CSR is setting up the technician call, he sort of explains how surprised he was that I went outside this late to test the line. (Hi. I don’t put “Tenacious Jen” on my bills, but obviously we’ve never met.) I then tell him that we’ve had a whole host of electronics problems this evening, and while I’m not at the point I’m going to start wearing a colander for a hat to keep the aliens out, I AM going just a little bit crazy with it all.
He laughed, I laughed, but I think we both knew I wasn’t lying. About the crazy part.
The colander hat is another matter entirely.
(Oh, update, the phone issue has been identified – there’s some work being done down the street & a crew “Stretched The Cable” causing a “Loss of Dial Tone”. I love the doublespeak for “We Fucked Up and Cut The Cable” resulting in “You Had No Phone.” But it’s fixed now!)
