Technical exasperation and a winter blast?

April 11, 2020 by Julie Holmes, author 17 Comments

Image by annca from Pixabay

Happy Easter (or Passover or *fill in religious flavor*) weekend everyone! Nothing quite like not getting together with family for egg hunts and jelly beans.

We usually host Easter for my in-laws, so this year we haven’t been rushing around to finish stashing clutter and cleaning stuff. Wait, that might not be a bad idea anyway…

I didn’t expect Week 4 of working from home to be any different than the past three weeks. Except it was. Note that all the schools were on an extended spring break until this week, when they started their online learning stuff.

We live out in the boonies. Even though we are only a mile and a half outside town, our town is all of maybe 2000 residents, and at least a dozen miles from the nearest major highway/interstate. Consequently, we have DSL internet service, and not even very good DSL at that (read: streaming movies? Don’t bother. We’re lucky to watch YouTube vids without buffering).

Our internet service has been slow but sufficient for years, and just enough for the past few weeks as I was remoting to the office servers for work.

That service was fine until this week, when all of a sudden even opening Google seemed to be a Herculean task that never finished. Seriously. I can’t work like that. So naturally I call our ISP (Internet Service Provider, the only show in town for a long time) to see if they can either improve the speed or bump us to a better tier (especially since they raised our price last November).

The ISP said they can’t do anything about the drop in speed. A phone line for DSL only handles so much, and even though we’re paying for “up to 6 Mbps” download speed, we have never gotten that. Ever.

However, I suspect they are throttling our speed during the day to shunt the capacity elsewhere, because from 7a to 7p every single day this week our internet was at a virtual standstill, even too slow to run an internet speed test.

Ugh. I can’t work like that. We do have some other ISP options these days, and at a comparable price (after they increased our rate without giving us better service), so we ordered new service from a different provider. As you might guess, they are super busy right now (go figure!). We might have new service installed in six weeks.

Image by Syaibatul Hamdi from Pixabay

So, I’m going to work my way into a “night shift” to take advantage of the usable speeds from 7p to 7a. That of course still means I can’t do anything on the internet during the day. All my plans to catch up with blog post reading, etc. have been scuttled

Sigh.

I’m waaaay far behind, so if you see a comment from me on a post that’s a month old, don’t be surprised. Luckily(?) my new writing class is pretty paper-based, so I have no excuses to not do my homework.

As for spring, we had one awesome 70-degree day this week. I even took the opportunity to go for my first outdoor run of the year. Beautiful!

Glad I enjoyed it because Easter is supposed to be snowy. Yes, you read that right: the spring celebration of Easter comes with its very own winter storm watch. They are including a few inches of snow in that watch. And next week our daily high temps are predicted to be 20 degrees below normal, so think a few degrees above freezing.

Nothing like spring in MN to wonder if the seasons have identity crises.

Anyway, I have my lights up, a book to revise, and a hunky Muse (who is giving me the stink-eye because I’m not working on said book right now), so I’m good.

Stay safe and Happy Easter/Passover/etc!