I just love it when this happens!!!

You're using your laptop in a normal manner: enjoying some music, reading an article, chatting with people, waiting for an e-mail, writing an article – well, you know how it is. :P

…and suddenly the net stops – first you notice a disconnection report message from one of the IM services and just shrug thinking "Ach, Yahoo's unstable anyway…". Then a page won't load. So you go to the console and try to ping – nothing.

Hmmm… You try tracepath – dies off just after after leaving the router.

hrMMMMmm… You connect to your router and look at what's wrong – "Cannot connect to ISP". You lazily restart the router and the modem, sure to wait a minute before you plug them back in – "Should be enough time" you think …nothing.

HRRRRRRRrrrmMM!! You go to your phone, dial your ISP's number (which you know by heart by now!) and notice the blasted line's busy – slightly pissed off you crack a sarcastic smile (SiOL is tightly connected with the Telekom – the national telephone provider – anyway) while you take use of the "automatic redial" on your phone (god bless the one who invented this annoying torturing device!!).

After about 17 tries (cca. 17 minutes) you get the connection and press the button for tech support (which you also know by heart already).

After 5 minutes of waiting you decide that you've had enough sitting and put the call on the speaker (another ingenious invention, if you have to make such a call!), so you can go make some tea, grab a book and a piece of the cake from my dad's naming day yesterday. You turn the volume on the speaker a bit down, so you can enjoy yourself while waiting in line.

*sip* *bite* 7 minutes *sip* *bite* *turn page* 10 minutes *sip* *bite* *sip* *sip* 15 minutes and you run out of cake, carrying the plate into the kitchen *sip* *sip* *turn page* *sip* *sip* *sip* 20 minutes *sip* 20-something minutes "Hello, insert_random_name here. Can I help you?"

After talking to the techsupport guy – conviencing him already with the first sarcastic remark, that you do know a thing or two about internet connection, routers, modems and more then one OS – you go check the connection again and find out that it went back up in the 40 minutes you've waited for reaching the help line. No fiddling on you part – so it's pretty clear where the error originated. You take another sip from your cuppa and calmly sit back behind your laptop.

I wrote this post intentionally in the second person, so you can better live through what I have just now – a year and a day after first launch of this homepage and finding out it's offline (again) without my fault.

At this point I'd like to thank for my sanity to:

  • The Light Fantastic (a Discworld novel) by Terry Pratchett
  • the geniuses already mentioned
  • my brother and myself for baking the cake yesterday
  • Sacher tea

hook out → drinking more of the same tea reading the already mentioned article about GPLv3, trusted computing, DRM and so on, told by Eben Moglen


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