Through Lattice Windows: Sabotaged, Or Not - Depending On How You Look At It
"Ah! Revelation dawns at last. My dream is to write. In that department, nothing stands in my way. 'Have laptop, can work', as the saying more or less goes. Maybe, then, I ought to get on with it. Twitter and the wonderful web sites that intrigue and inspire me so much will be there when the technician gets up the pole again and sorts out the telephone lines,'' writes Leanne Hunt.
Last week I wrote about getting a Twitter account and feeling as if I had acquired a magic spaceship. My access to people and information was huge! I was exhilarated, joyful, energetic and full of plans to find really thoughtful people to follow. Then disaster struck. The connection broke.
I'd been having some trouble with my Safari internet program all morning. At lunchtime, while doing a search according to my interests, Twitter itself informed me that it was having trouble loading. I suspected peak-hour traffic, it being the time when locals would be taking their lunch-hour and Americans on the East Coast would be heading for the office. I pictured millions of enthusiastic twitterers poring over their laptops and mobile phones as they read the latest tweets from their interest group and typed in their own instant messages to send out to the world.
At this point, however, my doorbell rang. I found my neighbor standing there, looking harassed after a day's work and irritated because her phone line wasn't working. She'd come to tell me in case I needed to get hold of her for a favor, she being my number one helper when it comes to transport and proof-reading. According to her, a technician from the telephone department had been up a pole in the neighbour's garden and, after he'd finished doing whatever it was he'd come to do, she had no dialing tone on her phone and no ADSL connectivity. Naturally, I thought of my own trouble downloading search results but by that time it was the end of the working day so the technician had already gone home. My heart sank as I anticipated a whole evening without my brilliant spaceship!
Sure enough, when I contacted the fault reporting service via my cell phone and they tested the line, they confirmed that it was out of order. Was it perhaps my equipment, they wondered? No. Was I aware that, if it did turn out to be my equipment, there would be a call-out charge for the technician to visit? Yes, I knew that. Would I tell them which light on the modem was shining and give the name of my router? No, I couldn't do that because I was blind. Was it possible for me, as a blind person, to read an SMS if they sent one? Yes, because I have special software on my cell phone that reads messages out loud.
The call centre operator duly took down all my details. It used up nearly all of my air time but at least the fault was logged along with my neighbour's fault and, hopefully, everybody else's fault in our block. I don't know what the technician did to turn a small localized problem into a massive line failure. Perhaps, giving him the benefit of the doubt, he removed a part that was old and in need of replacement with the intention of coming back the following day to install a new one. However, we are used to poor service delivery in our city and it may just be that he fiddled a bit too much and upset the entire works. If that's the case, it will be at least four days before he gets the work order for our street and he may even insist on testing all our equipment before going back up the pole to do an inspection.
If it sounds as if I'm annoyed, I am. My brand new adventure of meeting people all over the world with the same interests as me has been interrupted before it even got properly going. Names of authors and experts in my favorite fields keep popping into my mind like stars beckoning me to visit. It's literally painful to think of my magic spaceship lying disabled on my desk, powered by electricity but denied the opportunity to travel the broadband superhighway.
It will mean going back to the plug-in 3G thingumajig again, I'm afraid. It works fine, but switching the program from wireless connectivity to that little gizmo is complicated. All my resentment rises up when I have to do it, especially when I get it wrong and have to ask someone else to help me. Which means, of course, that a technical problem has now become an emotional problem with the potential of ruining my otherwise fantastic streak of success.
Maybe I have to look at this whole thing another way. What is it about not being connected on the internet that really gets to me? I think I know the answer. It's that, without being able to drive, I rely on the internet to access the outside world. So why does not being able to access the outside world bother me? Because it increases my feeling of helplessness as a blind person. Why does feeling helpless worry me? Because it lowers my self-esteem. What's wrong with low self-esteem? It renders me unworthy of realizing my dream. What is my dream? That's easy - to write and be published.
Ah! Revelation dawns at last. My dream is to write. In that department, nothing stands in my way. "Have laptop, can work", as the saying more or less goes. Maybe, then, I ought to get on with it. Twitter and the wonderful web sites that intrigue and inspire me so much will be there when the technician gets up the pole again and sorts out the telephone lines. meanwhile, I have a dream to pursue and time to do it in. Oh, happy writer that I am!
Post Script: Amazingly, it was less than twenty-four hours before a technician from the telephone department called to tell me that they'd been upgrading the box on top of the pole that served our block,. All that remained to be done was connect the various lines to their respective numbers. This he did within the space of half an hour, with the result that I and my magic spaceship could once again traverse the ether in quest of fabulous stories and the people who originate them.
