Check your email, check your gmail, check your female

It’s Easter morning, and I’m a little late sinking into this week’s blog. There’s a good reason to: I’ve been in ‘Puter Purgatory since last Thursday. My DSL modem bit the dust then, and the earliest I can receive the replace is tomorrow afternoon. For some bizarre reason, there’s a perception that people who live in the mountains live on the Moon. Well, as I casually remind them, we have bison, mountain lions, elk, deer, foxes, lynx, bears, and coyotes here in the wilds of Colorado. We also have indoor plumbing…


That’s shallow background, and not necessarily a contributor to this hellish feel to the last four days of my life. Internet access is certainly technological addiction, and it’s really been difficult to function. But not because I needed my technology fix.


I use my Internet to get my work to my newspaper, and – of course – the modem gave up the ghost on deadline day. This isn’t the first time it’s happened. Once I receive my replacement from Qwest, I will gladly return the fifth modem that has been burned to a technological crisp. Definitely an inferior product, and I hope Qwest takes note. But I have been assured by TS (tech support) the modem I’m being sent this time is a different brand.


OK, this has been frustrating enough for me. I was able, miraculously, able to get all my stories to the paper except for one (you knew there’d be one), and it was critical that I check my gmail account to see if the deep background arrived so I could bang that final article out. My extended deadline came and went sans info from the company.


Quelle domage, as the French say.


So I decided to take matters into my own hands. Yeah, I would have to shell out a C Note to get my problem fixed (a sour note for sure in the soundtrack of the misadventure preparing to play itself out).


Or so I thought.


I head to what we mountain dwellers refer to as The Flatland. I don’t live in close proximity to shopping malls and the like. Going to The Flatland is like preparing for an expedition. With the current price of gas, bound to climb to all-time highs as Colorado prepares for the 2009 tourista season, one must carefully choreograph the journey. My trip to Walmart was pretty single minded: pick up a new wireless router/modem combo, get the hell out of Dodge, get home, get the equipment installed, and take two aspirin and call someone in the morning.


When I get back, despite assurances to the contrary, the equipment isn’t compatible with Vista. You’ve got to be jerking my chain!


I’m the kind of person who gets things done, especially when something falls into the category of a problem that needs a fix. So, I hop back into my Toyota T100 (we all drive trucks up here at altitude), head back for the flats. I return the modem, and dart over to the closest Staples. Although we have a Staples up here, the store didn’t have the correct equipment, hence a 14-mile one way trip morphed into a 35-mile-one-wayer.


It’s my lucky day, or so I thought. They have two of the correct modems in stock, and I loving clutch the box to my bosom and once again make a beeline for my casa. Before I left the flats, I had the presence of mind to ask an important question: should this equipment be defective, could I return it to my local store? The answer was yes, and I felt better having that measure of confidence.


Silly me.


I get home and take the modem out of the box and…you’ve got to be kidding…it’s broken. At first I thought the break was probably just cosmetic. So I decided to proceed with the installation. Well, I am still in an Internet dead zone, and I call Netgear. The guy at the other end asked me to give him the serial number, and then asked me if I was so-and-so. Well, I wasn’t, and I assured him I had just purchased this equipment figurative nanoseconds before I called him. Turns out the equipment had been previously registered and reported as damaged. He made it sound like I had stolen something.


So I head (with a tremendous headache) to my local Staples with a case number in hand. At this stage, it’s evening and all I want to do is get home and have some dinner. After some wrangling, the credit was issued. Then I was told I could have purchased something cheaper to do the same job, so the sales guy talked me into buying yet another piece of equipment.


Keep in mind: I have already racked up hundreds of dollars worth of useless equipment on my credit card, which is going to close for the billing cycle some time today. I am surely fated to see all these charges – but none of the credits -- appear for the current billing.


So I leave Staples and about half-way home in the 14-mile-one-wayer, my brain is just rankling. I pull over to inspect the latest purchase and, of course, it’s the wrong piece of equipment. So I turn tail, talk to the same guy at the store, get my credit and go home…again.


It’s a good thing I’m not a drinking person.


During this fiasco, I’ve been driving backandforthandbackandforth to a friend’s house (Jean, thanks for being such a trooper in all this) to check my email and check my gmail. I’ll make the trek one final time today because I have to send a story to the paper. I am being as Zen as possible in this tribulation, realizing that things could be worse. The new modem arrives tomorrow afternoon, and I have my fingers crossed that this chapter in my misadventures will close itself…at least until this next modem predictably dies.


Oh, yeah. Tomorrow I take my truck in for some maintenance.