Offline Again

The good news is that I didn't break the Internet by downloading and uploading too many megabytes.

The bad news is that there's actually something wrong with the physical Internet connection in my apartment.

Last night a nice man from building maintenance came into my place and tried very hard to fix my connection. I told him that my iBook worked fine, and that if he looked at the hub that he would see that only the green power light was on and none of the others, that the connection was obviously broken, not my laptop. I showed him how it didn't work when I circumvented the hub and plugged right into the wall.

He asked me how to run DOS on my laptop. After a few minutes of trying very hard to explain to him that there was no DOS on a Mac, I gave up and let him look at it. He loaded up IE since it made him more comfortable than did watching me hit "Reload" in Safari or Firefox. It was all really pointless and a waste of time but I know that everyone will always look for the obvious answers first, namely "Did the user screw something up?"

After he started to believe that maybe I wasn't the total idiot he had at first assumed, we went downstairs to the office PC. I plugged the ethernet cord from the office PC into my iBook, and of course got right on-line. He looked surprised. Also annoyed. We spent some time in other apartments, plugging in and unplugging until finally he was convinced that my laptop worked just fine, even though he still couldn't find DOS.

He took apart the ethernet connector thingy back in my place and it all looked fine. Now he thinks I need a new faceplate, or that maybe there's a problem up on the roof.

Sadly, there's no WiFi anywhere nearby.

I assume all this means I won't have Internet access at my apartment anymore since I'm leaving in a week and a half. Maybe I'll get more work done. But it is going to mean I'm a lot less available than I have been and probably means some wasted time commuting to coffee shops with WiFi on Fridays. I guess if anyone really needs to find me, they can use this cool thing called a telephone.