18 Hours Without Internet!

While Hick was text-bragging about his phone being fixed, I was having my own issue. 

NO INTERNET!

Such a cruel blow from The Universe. The two main joys in my life (excluding family, of course) are my scratchers and my internet, with TV a close third. To have one ripped away was traumatic!

I had shut down around 11:30 on Tuesday night. Everything seemed normal. The only difference being that my ailing, anemic HIPPIE had been shutting down about every 10 minutes for the last hour. HIPPIE has these episodes. His battery is not charging and needs to be replaced, but The Pony says a new battery would cost as much as a new laptop these days. Besides, I have a new laptop, which The Pony got me a couple of Christmases ago. It's all set up, residing on the kitchen table behind HIPPIE. It has a bit smaller screen and keypad, and runs Windows 11 and Google Chrome. I keep resisting the change.

Anyhoo... on Wednesday at 11:30 a.m., I turned on HIPPIE. After the startup sequence, I noticed that my internet icon was a big empty globe. That means NO INTERNET! Tom Cullen himself could have understood that, though he would have called it M-O-O-N.

I figured it was just HIPPIE being cantankerous. I did a restart. Nope. I did a full shutdown and startup. Nope. I disconnected and connected. Nope. Sometimes HIPPIE gets all persnickety and locks me out of internet for an hour. Exactly 60 minutes. But that usually still shows the rainbow bars representing my wi-fi connection. I waited an hour, and tried again. Nope.

This was becoming annoying. I ripped out the mouse plug-in thingy, and jabbed it into my new computer (as yet to be named) and had to call The Pony for a password that had been set up and forgotten. The password got me in, but still no connection. So it wasn't just a HIPPIE issue.

I can't get down the 13 rail-less stairs to the basement where the DISH receiver for internet resides in Hick's workshop, and the wi-fi router sits on a desk at the bottom of those stairs. I called Hick and told him he'd need to re-set them both when he got home. This usually works to restore the internet.

Hick was here at 3:30. He did this chore, then went out to mow the front yard/field and elsewhere about the grounds. When I changed out of town clothes and sat down with my scratchers, I realized that my internet STILL was not working. I wasn't going to call Hick back in off his precious zero-turn mower to try again.

I had resigned myself to calling DISH to complain. I've had to do it before. The wait is usually 30 minutes or more. I get some exceedingly polite foreign gal who is almost impossible to understand. She wants a four digit code which I most often remember. She asks the problem, if I ran the troubleshooting, and what message I got, and what I've tried. So I wrote it down:

YOUR DNS SERVER MIGHT BE UNAVAILABLE

CONTACT YOUR NETWORK ADMINISTRATOR OR INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDER

WINDOWS CAN'T FIND THE WELL KNOWN HOST www.microsoft.com USING DNS

By now it was 4:55. I figured a lot of people on the east coast and in the midwest would be off work, and calling about their DISH internet problems. I wanted time to get my issue resolved and fix Hick's supper and still watch Big Brother at 7:00. So I decided to have Hick go to the basement one more time to try again with the resets. Besides, Foreign Gal would ask me to try that, and ask what lights were showing on the receiver.

Hick came in at 5:15. I told him the internet still wasn't working, and asked if he'd do the resets again. He did. I didn't have much hope. I had one scratcher left to work on. When I finished and glanced up at HIPPIE's screen, 

THE INTERNET-CONNECTED WI-FI RAINBOW WAS SHOWING!

At 5:30, I had my internet back. I was able to join Blogland again. Hick's meat loaf and green beans were served. And I was in my OPC (Old People Chair) in time for Big Brother.

We're hoping to remain calamity-free for a couple weeks.