Voenix Rising

Our power went out yesterday afternoon. It’s happened 3 or 4 times since we moved into this townhouse, and it usually comes back up within a minute or so.

It was no different yesterday. The power went out and came back on before I could even turn around to shut anything off. Everything started back up except the internet. Our Orbi cable modem/router was blinking and showing a solid purple glow. We powered it off a couple times, disconnected everything, and powered it back up with no success.

Great, I thought. It’s fried.

Ben—bless his heart—called Cox (aka a trip to the Ninth Level of Hell). They could see the modem, and in fact, successfully sent reset commands. Each time it got to the point right before the final connect and the blinking would never stop. If left in that state, eventually it would start glowing purple, indicating—according to the folks at Netgear—indicated there was a problem connecting to the cable company. Well duh.

Cox was of no help. The girl, while sympathetic, had run through her troubleshooting scripts and suggested that we “go buy a $30 modem to verify that it’s not your hardware.”

Where, exactly, does one locate a THIRTY DOLLAR modem/router?

Ben ended up and Best Buy and came home with the cheapest modem/router he could find—at $145. “At least,” he said, “we have 30 days to return it if it doesn’t work either.”

We hooked everything up and once again, Cox was unable to initialize the device. Well, that was a relief. Our nearly new Orbi wasn’t at fault.

They agreed to send out a technician—if we signed up for the monthly maintenance plan first. (The representative basically refused to roll a truck without that service plan being in place.)

Needless to say our collective blood pressures were going through the roof.

Initially they’d scheduled a visit for tomorrow afternoon. Then the rep said that time slot had disappeared when she went to reserve it. So it was pushed out to Tuesday. She assured us we were on the calendar.

Our connectivity wasn’t completely cut off. Cox has a hotspot network in place that customers can tap into (this is how I’m posting today). It’s slow, but at least it works. We also have hotspots on our phones, but neither of those options are viable solutions for using Apple TV.

We left the new modem connected overnight since that was the one now on our account, and I figured if it decided to sort itself out overnight we’d go ahead and swap the Orbi back in and call The Ninth Circle of Hell again to get that put back on the account.

Unfortunately it still wasn’t working, and in fact, when Ben went online to look at our account, there was no record of our scheduled Tuesday visit, prompting yet another call to Cox. We now have a service call scheduled for tomorrow afternoon.

I was already scheduled to work from home tomorrow, and I can tether my work laptop to my personal hotspot, so I’m not going to have to go into the office—not that I can because of the service appointment. The connection is slow as fuck, so how it all plays out tomorrow is going to be interesting to say the least.

This episode has pointed out how dependent we’ve become upon our wireless connection. Our smart plugs, thermostat, and garage door opener are now offline. Everything still works, but everything needs to be done manually again.

I’m getting really tired of all this bullshit.

Fuck. Just fuck.