Morning with Technology

Good afternoon to all you loyal, although I assume by now sporadic, blog readers,

The time has come on this rare Mexican long weekend to tell the tale of our great Christmas excursion. But first, a point on a minor adventure I had this morning. You see, my internet connection had flippantly decided not to work (a not uncommon occurrence in this supposedly developed country); and like any warm blooded, male communication reservist, I chuckled at my laptop's impertinence and set about to fix the bloody thing.

An hour later, an improvised runway has been constructed between the laptop in the kitchen and the desktop in the living room. Back and forth I galloped, instructions from the help site of one computer being applied to the other. After a few rounds of this I came to the embarrassing realization that my laptop is indeed a laptop, and can be moved, and then set about typing various potions into the command prompt, hoping the right combination of sweat, cursing, and typing would somehow birth a viable wireless connection. No such luck.

Later, I found myself teetering on one of our high quality Mexican dining chairs attempting to decipher what kind of, you know, black box wireless router thingy that we owned. Why teetering at heights you ask? Because it is only logical that our most technical computer equipment would be stuffed on a decrepit shelf above the open fuse box with a kaleidoscope of bare wires dangling out of it. You have to hand it to the industry of the Mexican electricians; when they wire a house, they also put their own modernist art interpretation into the final product. Alas, I prayed, typed, ran, climbed, nothing would work. The last trouble shooting strategy on my list was to dump the laptop on the bed in front of Caroline.

I then set about the less technical task of taking out garbage and polishing my shoes, when a call came from our room. You see, Caroline discovered, in basically 30 seconds, that SOMEBODY (probably a Russian spy) had selected the unfathomable option of “work offline” on the internet explorer browser. I ask you, what kind of machine contains an essentially “Do not work” switch. It’d be like having an ignition port in the steering column of your car that read “Turn to flood engine.” It makes NO SENSE, and I blame Microsoft, and America, and the 21st century for these travails. From now on I stick to shoe polishing!