Opps! There Goes Our Window to the World

During our now regular Sunday dinners, after announcing this happened to be our 13th year anniversary in Budapest, we moved on to the topic of Internet connections. Sharing our experiences back in 2001, our friends were in awe over the advancements. We moved from a dial-up modem paying for every minute of telephone time except between 11pm and 7am to a full-fledged high speed cable connection.

It must have been a hex or a premonition. Monday morning our Internet connection stopped. I did all the things I normally know to do before calling the cable company, one of which is to wait an hour to see if any changes have taken plus. Then I powered everything off, rebooted the computer, and went through the checklist. No luck!

I called the cable company. Press 7 for English, press 2 if you have Internet connection issues, then the message is “You may find what assistance you need on our website.” Duh!! If I could get the website, I would not need to call in the first place or at least not by pressing 7 and then 2. I waited in the cyber-line for my turn. When I spoke to a human and explained the problem, he had me do all sort of things, although I had explained I did them already. Then he reset the connection from the office.  It did not work. He said he had to transfer me to another level tech person who answered my call, but could not hear me. “If you don’t answer in 3 seconds, I am cutting this call” he announced. The line went dead.

Two more calls were unsuccessful, but four was the charmed number this time. Again, the tech ran me through the paces, but could not find any errors on their end. It is always the computer’s fault; never the responsibility of the cable company. After pushing for more service, he finally agreed to send out a technician to look at the wiring to see if that was the culprit. They were due today between 8am and noon.

If the meanwhile, I left the computer on all day long to see if anything would change. 
What we did all day without the Internet:
Head to the computer for researching some movie then realize it is not working.
Read books
Sit down to write e-mails and then remembering they cannot be sent yet.
Took naps
Flip on the tablet to read the news, but only finding “No Connection Found”
Went out on errands we would normally put off
It was a long day!!
By 10pm, the icon previously showing no Internet connection made the conversion to being connected to the wider world. Hooray, but do I cancel the technician coming? No, it could have been a fluke that it started working. Why risk losing a house call if it turned out to be needed.

As it turned out, it was necessary. There was no WiFi anywhere in the apartment. When the technician came of course his English was limited, but we managed. He saw the computer was now connected, but I told him there was no WiFi. He booted his netbook and showed me there was. I booted up my tablet to trump his bid and there was no connection. A smile came over his face. It turned out that when the office reset the connections from the office, they reset everything back to the default, which included our connection name and password. To be fair, the man told me it would revert to the default, but it did not occur to me what was included in this.

When I asked the technician in our living room to change our connection name back to BudaBaB with our original password, he agreed to do so. However, it turned out the cable box had other ideas. In the end, he had to replace the entire cable box. Job well done and problems solved!

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