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I Spy O
by Asa Butcher
2007-08-29 10:42:03 |
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Offline: Local Area Connection has no signal – Contact your local provider for assistance. Yes, I am disconnected, cut off and hate every isolated minute. What am I supposed to do with my life now my access to the World Wide Web has been brutally snatched away by either a malfunctioning modem, unstable connection or simply a ghost in the machine?
I feel naked. I feel lonely. Skype is constantly trying to connect, my MSN man has a tiny X over his face, my email accounts grasp desperately for contact with the server, Firefox keeps timing out, the RSS Feeds are hungry and I can't access Facebook to update my situation: "Asa is… pressing his nose up against Windows trying to see what he is missing."
It is as though a prankster has covered my windows and removed my doorknob; I know there is a world out there but I'm jiggered if I can get barely a glimpse of it. There could be people ringing the bell trying to enter the door commonly known as Ovi Magazine, but here I am inside a soundproof booth unable to hear their pleas of desperation to contribute to our esteemed publication.
I phoned Technical Support and the gentleman was actually quite helpful, but we couldn't figure out the problem together. He suggested trying another modem to eliminate the possibility that ours is kaput, so I rushed over to Thanos' and borrowed his. Unfortunately I also brought home a piece of chewing gum on my arse that his daughter had kindly left on a chair – I went from one sticky problem to another.
How to remove gum from jeans… I know: I'll Google the problem… d'oh! It was then that I remembered a long-forgotten shelf in the corner of our flat, which carried a selection of encyclopaedias, DIY guides, medical journals, dictionaries and even an atlas. A range of books that are all found in my bookmarks or with a simple Google query, but not today. I'm going to sound like my granddad now, but I'd forgotten how rewarding it is to research something in a book.
Don't roll your eyes at me! In a book you are more likely to head off on a tangent and begin reading adjacent entries. On the 'chewing gum' page alone I learnt all about Chesapeake Bay in the Atlantic, I discovered that a chessel is a mould used in cheese-making and is not in the Microsoft Word dictionary, Cheynes-Stokes breathing is alternating shallow and deep breathing in comatose patients and I even found Chichester, a town in southern England where I went to school. It was fascinating stuff!
After half-an-hour my wife asked about the progress of the chewing gum removal research and I hastily thumbed back to that entry: "Freeze the gum with an ice cube and then break it off with your fingers." So now I am waiting for the water in my ice cube tray to freeze, which may surprise some of you who thought that in Finland we get our ice cubes through its ice fishing industry.
Whether the ice cube freezing trick will work on the gum isn't particularly exciting and I'm sure you don't give a monkey's toss concerning the outcome, but you have stuck with me this far through my offline ramblings and for that I am grateful. Now I expect you will happily click the back button, check you emails and continue to take your online status for granted, but beware because it can vanish without warning…The connection has timed out…
Asa_Butcher Ovi_magazine Ovi-lehti |
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