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PowerlessDecember 26, 2007 Don't get me wrong: I think wireless Internet is great. My wireless connection is great -- when it's working. When it's working consistently. Mine often isn't. I'll settle down to a couple hours online fact-checking -- and it'll cut out every three minutes or so. I'll take a work break to download e-mail and nada. "Limited or no connectivity." If I ever thought that calling someone or something "dependable" was damning with faint praise, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Amends are on the way, O ye fates, gods, and muses. Please call off your dogs! I've learned to keep an eye on the little icon on my taskbar. When it's happy, it looks like a computer monitor doing jumping jacks from the waist up. When it's not happy its innards turn red and it glowers like the Eye of Sauron. Sometimes it looks happy but isn't really: attempts to download e-mail or connect to the Web take forever and then collapse at your feet. When the icon isn't happy, I perform certain rituals to propitiate it: I run the "repair" utility, and I move the wireless adapter (it looks like a metallic middle finger standing at attention on top of my Zip drive which is on top of Morgana V's mini-tower) this way and that. True, this often restores the connection, at least for a few minutes, but it's pretty much like waving a wand and saying "Open, Sesame!" or "Abracadabra! Work, you sucker!" The real problem is that as soon as my connection goes on the fritz, I become obsessed with reconnecting. Never mind that I could leave the task at hand till later, and really never mind that some people I know manage to get along quite nicely if they don't log on for a week; I even have one friend who doesn't own a computer. I sit down to download e-mail -- taking a break, mind you -- and if the Eye of Sauron persists in its glower I counter-persist until I've killed half an hour waving my wand and yelling "Abracadabracadabracadabra!" over and over again. I'll start a game of Spider or Rat Poker to keep me amused while I'm trying to evade or placate the Eye. Why do I start a solitaire game? So I won't be wasting time, of course. I'm wasting time while wasting time and calling it "not wasting time." That's how I know I'm in trouble. Drunks aren't rational about their drinking, and I'm not rational about my Internet connection. The time has come to admit I'm powerless over wireless, turn the whole damn thing over to the computer gods, and get back to work.
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