I hope this will come through on time. If I understand my brief yet quite delayed conversation with technical support correctly, somewhere around 3:30 this afternoon Venison Internet was struck by a small, powerful black hole which devoured all the hardware and all wires connecting the entire network together, resulting in the East Coast being turned into a disconnected mass of orphaned packets, searching desperately for a router to follow. I might have saved myself some time waiting on technical support if their automated message warning that they knew of connectivity problems didn't specify that they knew the problem was in some Massachusetts towns I never heard of. They had my phone number and thus area code -- they had it twice, in fact, since they got it wrong after the first layer of transferring me from one voice mail queue into another -- so given that the problem was, apparently, widespread, they could have identified the region as being in the state from which I was calling (New Jersey, also frustration).
On the good side, when I did finally reach an actual person, he identified the problem from my first sentence -- identifying the symptom and the time the symptom started -- and didn't suggest that I should try rebooting the modem or computer. So, yes, this does have to count as my for once having an easily documented, reproducible problem believed the first time around. They must have been incredibly overworked. (Very briefly I was able to catch a neighbor's wireless signal, evidently on some functional network, but they promptly closed that. Hardly seems neighborly.) I know no shame rationally attaches to me if I'm late posting due to the Internet Service Provider being absent -- I suffered through that time Livejournal's servers were melted from 6 pm on to the next day (Singapore time), after all -- particularly if I've written my essay on time, but the prospect still drives me crazy.
Still, it can't be counted as a bad day overall, because there were two episodes of The Price is Right to watch, counting the evening Million Dollar Spectacular. Still, I would like a policy put in place that if a stoner-model contestant bids $420 for the Item Up For Bid to the whooping glee of his companions in the audience then he should not be allowed to win anytime during the day. If by some chance he does win and get up on stage then he has to play the boring, time-saver games like ``Switch?''. Nice thing about the Million Dollar Spectacular is they cut out some commercial breaks, so the show is much more contiguous. When it ran on Channel 5 in Singapore they'd cut out several commercial breaks, including that between the Showdown bids and revelation, and end the show about ten minutes before the hour.
Trivia: At least one contestant from The Price Is Right has fainted on Bob Barker. Source: Quiz Craze, Thomas A DeLong.
Currently Reading: The Old Post Road: The Story Of The Boston Post Road, Stewart H Holbrook.