Tuesday, April 30, 2019

"Unplugged"

Last Wednesday evening I was upstairs making Olivia’s bed while she soaked in the bath. I was watching The Act on Hulu through my phone.

Alyssa was in her bathroom, ‘grooming’ before her shower. She was watching YouTube.

Tom was…doing something downstairs. Probably packing something to be shipped the next day.

The show on my phone started buffering and then stopped completely. I closed the Hulu app, thinking I was just too far from the living room, which is where our router is. It sometimes does make a difference where you are in house for the WIFI to reach your device.

A few minutes later, Alyssa came in, all fresh from the shower.

“Are you in the WIFI?” she asked, wanting to know if I was hogging all the bandwidth.

“No,” I informed her. “My Hulu was being weird so I turned off my WIFI.”

She flounced down the stairs to see if Tom was on the computer, which, by its very proximity to the router and modem, is the first served by our WIFI.

He wasn’t.

Huh. Weird.

Later, Tom mentioned he thought he’d heard the router sizzle earlier that evening.

Whatever the case, we had no internet.

It was 7:45pm on a Wednesday.

Whatever were we going to do with ourselves without precious weefee!?!

I mean, sure, we have more DVDs than I care to count. We have antenna TV, we have books and board games.

But you’d have thought we were in the middle of a blackout without access to candles.

We did end up watching a rerun of The Goldbergs and the last half of Chicago Med and then the first ten minutes of the newest season of The Amazing Race (fucking Rupert from Survivor is on there, back in his stupid ass tie-dyed shirt, OMG!) and then were all in bed by 9:30, with lights out and eyes closed.

It was actually kind of amazing.

Of course, we expected to come home on Thursday to find that Tom has gotten everything fixed.

We were disappointed by that expectation. Though it was softened by spending almost two hours at my mom’s after school and work, soaking up her lovely WIFI.

When we got home, Tom announced that the new modem he’d purchased that day for $150 did not fix the problem. Our internet provider would be out sometime the next day, Friday, with a new router.

So we spent another evening without WIFI. Both Alyssa’s and my phone have access to data but it costs us. I was able to check emails for Tom and get addresses for his shipments but there would be no Hulu or Netflix.

We ended up watching The Hunger Games on DVD.

And we were in bed again by 9:30.

There’s something to be said for being unplugged, even if just a little.

But yes, I was incredibly glad when the WIFI was back in full force. I mean, come on, now that I’ve experienced Hulu…I don’t want to give it up.

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