See, after seeing all of this from some of the funniest women I know (of), it reminded me that brilliant and hilarious people are often faced with very tough issues, and many of them suffer from some sort of mental illness. So...obviously I started to get all OHNOI'MDEPRESSEDNOWIKNOWIT! Not because I'm brilliant or hilarious, but because I also have a blog. (Logic.)
Fast forward a few hours, I'm watching a movie on Netflix with my sons, and THE INTERNETZ BROKE. I realized a few days ago how web-addicted I am, but I quickly justified it with the fact that I literally have no job if I don't have you, Internetz. The fact that I do half my reading, all of my TV watching and news consumption, and about 90% of my socializing online is a job hazard. Right? Right.....?
So when the ZOMGINTERNETZBROKE of 2012 happened, I may have tweaked out. Only a little. I spent hours on the phone with the ISP. Again, this could be its own blog post (or its own entire blog) but this is a long story already. At the end of all this time, the man said that my modem was broken...surprise! It broke exactly one week To The Hour past my warranty. Coincidence? Maybe. But the same thing happened with my router a few months ago so I think not.
I decided to just go to bed. But then I remembered the whole depression thing and I thought "OH NOES! If I just go to bed, that's the first step to me waking up to no Internetz tomorrow, then I won't want any Internetz because it's Sunday, so I'll wake up on Monday with no Internetz and I'll get fired for not working and lose all my friends and I won't know what's going on in the world and never watch TV again and make drastically long run-on sentences....it's BEGINNING!
So about an hour past the time the boys should've been in bed, I load them up in the car and run to Walmart for a modem. (What? I hate Walmart? Why yes I do - but who else would have one tonight?) They had cable modems. Waaayyyy back on the shelf, all dusty and lonely, I found a dial-up modem. But I am apparently the last person on Earth using DSL.
After all of that, I wanted to get myself a little surprise for my trouble, so I walked around literally searching for one tiny thing in the entire store that I wanted. I found a red trashcan. And shampoo. Three dollars total, and I hated Walmart even more for not having stuff I wanted to waste money on. But they had one lane open and 20 people standing in it, so I shouted, "Let's go boys! We'll shop with people who know how to manage a store!" And my sons weren't embarrassed at all.
We went to Target. No DSL there, either. I didn't even bother wasting money there, because I already know Target has All The Things I Want.
I was already a little mad at the ISP guy on the phone, because from where he was in India, he could see my modem, and from where I was at my desk, I could see it. (By see it, I mean it was a "recognized" device.) So at what point was it "broken"?
See, internet is just exactly like plumbing. You get Internetz (water) through the cable running into your house. Then some more cables (just like pipes) take the Internetz to the modem, which is like a valve. If the valve were clogged, you wouldn't be able to see through it. But I could see right through the modem. Anyway, the modem sends Internetz on to a router, which is basically the sprinkler system, and the router showers Internetz all over your house. They are then collected in the "sinks" - your various devices, such as laptops and whatnot.
Incidentally, that's why it took us awhile to get cloud-computing...one day it got real hot and a bunch of Internetz evaporated and made a cloud we can put cool stuff in.
Anyway, because I could see through the valve, I should've had Internetz running freely to my router. But I didn't. You know how your water dude can shut off your water at the meter? That's a valve. (I think - I'm sorta making this up in case you couldn't tell.) When I came home from Target, Internetz were ALL OVER my floor because the modem had magically started working and was leaking everywhere because I hadn't bothered to plug it back into the router.
So what happened, ISP? Were you so interested in using this phone call to sell me a new modem that you didn't think to wait to turn the valve back on until AFTER I had actually bought one? I want to know.
The moral of the story is that I would've battled my make-believe depression much better if it weren't for my ISP and Walmart. Thanks a lot, guys.
And please keep my blogger friends in your prayers - if they don't bring the funny back, it's going to be left to people like me, and I don't want to be responsible for breaking the Internetz.
