Picture this… Wednesday, 9.00pm and I’ve managed for the first time in about two months to get a dropping LLL.in domain name into my cart and 1 click from checking out! And… nothing. My Internet connection failed before… actually not before – but JUST as I clicked “submit” to checkout. Bummer!
I spent about an hour trying to figure out what went wrong… then another hour waiting, thinking maybe my local exchange had problems or something… being optimistic that it’ll all be alright soon… but no.
I then spent almost 2 and a half hours on the phone to tech support at BeThere.co.uk – the guy was fantastic, he did his absolute best. We went through so many possibilities, IP changes from Static to Dynamic to MultiPort… router resets… some fiddling around with Mac addresses… he even got his senior manager on the line trying to help out… all this at like 1am.
Eventually, he confirmed the worst… I’d have to get a replacement router. BeThere.co.uk would be sending one out in the post free of charge, but he also said it could take two or three working days!!!!
Oh well, no big deal right?….
WHAT?
Are you mad!! Its a huge deal. I’ve six days to complete a web development project for a client – $5000 project to be precise. I also have a corporate showcase party arranged for Photography company and I need to get all the promotional material out to all the attendees!!! I’m FCUK’d!
Two days… I can live with… but if its three working days, that means Monday – actually no… Tuesday since its a Bank Holiday weekend!!! I thought I was totally screwed!
Anyway, I sulked and smoked about five cigarettes in the space of an hour before realizing a had a 56k modem! YES! Atleast I can send my promotional material out to clients. Great!
So I hooked it all up and pressed “dial”. I haven’t done this for years! The sound of the modem dialing and connecting was like going back to the early 90’s!! Reminded me of the movie “Hackers”.
Well, after a minute or so… I was back online. Now first thing I did was check who caught that domain – and so off I went to Whois.sc and there it was the name I’d been after for two months, taken by someone else. What made it worse was that it was taken about 10 seconds after I had it in my cart, meaning I would’ve successfully checked out had my connection not failed.
Ok, got over that quickly, nothing I coud do. I then opened Outlook – and that was it. I realised I was stuck. I had – what seemed like – normal everyday emails, but each one was taking like 3-4 minutes to load!!! Doesn’t seem so bad, but think about my promo material – each email is like 5mb-10mb in file size, thats gonna take like a day to send 1% of my list!!! Forget that.
I’m really annoyed, angry, panicing and bored all the same time. So I decide I need to stop thinking about work and chill… go to BBC and check out the latest sports news. www.bbc.co…. oh forget that – I can’t wait 5minutes for one page to load! 30minutes if it has a video on there. I’d had enough and went to bed.
This is getting a bit long now, I’d be surprised if anyone actually reading this far down.
I’m sorry.
I just had to share my pain of using Dial-up again. Its horrible. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. I feel really bad for those who still use Dial-Up! Its WRONG!
Oh, luckily I only had to wait 2 days and I got a new router on Friday. All this made me realize how much we take broadband for granted. So many people out there still use dial-up connections, broadband still isn’t an option for many people around the world – we should be grateful for what we have.
Right, back to work now – I’m already 2 days behind.
Cheerio.