Don't Panic

At some time late yesterday afternoon I lost my Internet connection.  I didn't realize that was what had happened at the time, I thought that there was a problem with the site that I was on at that particular time.  It was when I realized that my email was offline that I knew that the problem was at my end, so to speak. But by that time it was too late in the day for me to start worrying about it; it was something for tomorrow.

I overslept this morning, so ended up rushing around to get out of the house in time to catch the bus to go off to my psychotherapy session and then on the way home I did a little bit of shopping so that I would have some bread to make a sandwich for my lunch. So it wasn't until this afternoon that I could try to determine what the problem was.  I fired up the computer and found that I still didn't have a connection.  The problem with this is that the Internet is my lifeline and without it I lose much of my contact with the outside world.  But I wasn't going to panic.  I just had to hope that it wasn't going to be anything as serious as the problem that I had in the summer when I ended up without an Internet connection for nearly three weeks.

I went to the router and looked at the lights.  Yes, they were on, and then on a closer inspection I realised that the most important one wasn't illuminated.  Okay, I thought; I remembered that when I had a similar problem once before I was told to switch the modem off for a couple of hours and then to switch it back on again and see what happened.  This is what I did.  Then it was time to switch it back on again and wait for the lights to sort themselves out and see what happened.  Disaster!  That most important light wasn't illuminated again.  It looked as though I was going to have to make a phone call to my ISP and ask for help.

But I decided to try one thing before I did that.  I checked all the cables that enter the router to make sure that they were all secure. And the one that connects the phone socket to the router seems to have been just a little bit out of position and when this was jiggled into position, the all important light was illuminated.  Then it was a quick check of the computer and access to the Internet was possible again.  What a relief.  I was connected. Communication was again possible.  But what has puzzled me is how the connection could have been there one minute and not the next and that this seemingly be caused by a slightly misaligned cable input to the router.  How did this misalignment occur and why did I lose the connection at the precise moment that I did?  I suppose this will never be answered, and as I am now able to surf again, I'm not going to worry about it too much.

Having got up to date with the blogs on my blogroll, I had a quick look to see who had been visiting my blog in my absence, and I see that I have had another visitor from India googling "Procrastination is the thief of time".  I really would love to read the essays that are being produced on this subject, just so that I can see whether anybody admits to having visited my blog.