Minor crisis - our internet router died ...

 I was sitting in my study on a Sunday afternoon, idly looking online for a Christmas stocking filler for J when web pages suddenly stopped loading.

I looked up and the google smart display I use for playing podcasts was offline, and then I realised that the internet modem was not showing any lights at all, but the fibre optic transceiver was still flashing away.

So I unplugged the modem, and plugged it into a different power socket. Still nothing.

Plugged it back in to the original socket. Definitely dead.

Now in the ideal world, I would pull out the portable internet modem I use when I’m cataloguing artefacts where there’s no internet, or even use my mobile phone.

But I couldn’t. Due to some quirk of topography we don’t have a usable mobile signal at home, especially since they turned off the 3G service. Normally we just use wifi calling and everything is fine, but of course we couldn’t. And because wifi calling and texting is usually ultra reliable, we don’t have a mobile booster or anything like that.

Just to add to the fun, it was a Sunday afternoon, and anywhere with public wifi, like the town library, was closed.

So I walked up to a park next the town hall where I could get a signal, and contacted our ISP, Telstra, via their messaging app.

Well it was a half hour wait, but they did call me back, ran some tests, and agreed it was probably the router.

One of their standard tests they ask you to do is press reset on the modem for fifteen seconds, which I hadn’t done.

So even though it was pointless I walked home and did the test, having arranged for they to call me back in 20 minutes. Then back to the park to wait for the call.

I guess I could have lied, after all the device gave all the appearance of being as dead as a doornail, but who knows, weird things sometimes happen with routers.

They did call me back, agreed the unit was dead, and as it was still under warranty, they would ship me a replacement, but it would be Thursday at the earliest before they could get a replacement unit to me.

This of course left us with a problem.

No internet meant no phones, no internet radio, no access to all our documents stored in the cloud, including all J’s documents for an exhibition she was working on, or since I was due for an eye test on Monday, my previous optical test results.

I couldn’t even go and collect a Christmas tree we had ordered as we needed to call the store in advance to confirm the item was ready for collection. Fortunately J had a local copy of the email on her iPad so we photocopied the iPad using a multifunction printer.

So, Monday morning when the library was open off to use their free and rather slow internet.

Look it worked, and while there were a lot of people using it, it let us do those things we had to do, check email and the like, make sure bills had been paid and all the rest, plus a lot of furiously writing down phone numbers in a notebook, all to the background of story time for three and four year olds - almost like working in a open plan office.

Then out into the park to make the calls we had to make, plus a chat session (again) with Telstra to confirm the delivery address, as well as a text message to say they’d increased the quota for router’s in built back up 5G connection.

Back at home we dug out an old boom box that J had had when she rented a studio at the old lunatic asylum for a few months, and that gave us radio - other than our emergency radio we realised that we didn’t own an AM radio any more - everything else was FM only or else a dedicated internet radio receiver or smart speaker that played the audio stream.

That afternoon I had to drive into town to go have an eye test. I could have cancelled it I guess, but I also had to collect the damn Christmas tree as the store understandably would only hold it for a few days.

So I drove in, got there early and sat in the shopping centre checking emails on my phone and then had my eye test.

As always they were worried about slightly high pressure in one eye ball, and wanted to do a more precise test test which involved putting anaesthetic in my eye.

I refused.

Last time I had the test, despite their cheery ‘it’ll wear off in ten to fifteen minutes” it was an hour until I felt it was safe to drive.

I did agree to have the test at a later date on a day when I have to come back into Albury to do some things and it doesn’t matter if I end up sitting in the Art Gallery cafe doing nothing much for thirty or forty minutes, and I should probably get a new pair of middle distance glasses - not essential but my prescription has changed sightly in one eye.

As it was I drove out to collect the Christmas tree, and got some really helpful advice when I showed them J’s photocopied iPad - apparently if you put the iPad into dark mode you get a much more usable copy.

Christmas tree collected, I then sat in the shopping centre carpark and scanned my optical prescription using Office Lens and uploaded it to Evernote, before heading home.

It’s an interesting experience being without the internet. It’s not that you can’t find ways round it, like using the library’s wifi, but it is a bit like the early nineteen nineties, but without things you had then, like a daily postal delivery, newspapers, AM radio, and of course only free to air TV.

Not having internet tv streaming is a bit of a pain - we have a liking for Scandinavian crime dramas and currently our Sunday night binge is watching a 20 year old version of Wallander on demand, but it’s not like we can’t do without our internet TV.

In fact it’s not a complete washout. Fortunately, we still have a TV antenna, and we can watch the free to air channels, but there was nothing of the Sunday night dramas we remembered - in fact the offerings were so dire we ended up watching a programme about a farm shop in the English Lake District purely as eye candy, followed by an early night. Monday was much the same - a travelogue about the Missisippi and then an hour or so reading a Catalan crime novel in translation.

Fortunately we both have a couple of part read novels on our Kindles, so we had some bedtime reading, and if we run out before the router is fixed we can always borrow something from the library.

Tuesday is the day I normally go down to Lake View in Chiltern for some cataloguing and documentation work.

There’s no fixed internet at Lake View, so I’ve been successfully using my 4G travel modem to allow me to back up my data to OneDrive as well as look up things as I work, such as potters’ marks and oil lamp manufacturers.

Well, we needed some shopping delivered - we normally get an order via Woolworths home delivery service for the bulk standard things like cat litter, toilet paper, kitchen roll and the like, as well as prepackaged things we’ve run out of.

So I went down to Chiltern about half an hour earlier than usual, set up, and did a Woolies order as well as reading my email and catching up on news.

And there was some welcome news - an email from Telstra saying they had dispatched our replacement router - via StarTrack - unfortunately the auto generated message didn’t have the StarTrack tracking number so I couldn’t use Australia Post’s tracking app to see where the package had got to, but experience suggested that if StarTrack had really picked up the item from Telstra's  Melbourne dispatch centre, there’s a better than evens chance it getting on a delivery truck from Albury the next day.

And things turned out better than they should.

Despite saying it was coming with Star Track it actually came with a different courier (Toll)  and arrived the next afternoon.

I configured it, and everything came back to life – sure a few things like the TV box in the bedroom needed a restart but basically everything was normal – all that remained was to send the old unit back to Telstra which I did the next day.

So what was it like being thrown back into the nineteen eighties?

Tough - like I said the real problem was that we didn't have all the things you had in the eighties, like landlines that worked even when the power was off, not to mention regular postal deliveries and newspapers.

But the other revelation was just how much of a time sucker the internet is, I reckon we got back an hour or perhaps an hour and a half by not having the internet to play about on ...