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About To Lose Power and the Internet May Go Out

This was in the content of a message I received as a response from one of the professors today at work.  She's a Sister as in one of the nuns... She's over in Africa helping to teach for the summer.  She does this every summer.  The school is basically made of concrete floors, concrete blocks as the walls and a roof.  That's ABOUT it.

I was making accounts for the students to use Blackboard and we were emailing back and forth.  The power comes and goes.  They have rolling blackouts because there isn't enough energy to supply everyone and the internet isn't very reliable.  So they just use what they can when they can.

It's a very big hinderance to get work done and is a HUGE handicap for learning.

I suppose that title is a little misleading... You might have thought my power and internet were going to go out.

I actually had a small taste of this recently... My modem for Comcast kept going on and offline this week.  It was strange.  At first I thought maybe the modem was going bad, or perhaps there was an issue with Comcast.  So I reset the modem.  It worked fine for a while.  Then it cut out again.  I tried rebooting all my stuff.  I tried all the tricks in all the books.

Then I thought okay, I'll call Comcast, but I was certain they were going to have me take my modem to the nearest office or schedule a tech to come out.  The one AV guy at work suggested I first try re-seating all the connections and even removing any splitters just to test.

I inspected things when I got home after work last night and found that yes there were two splitters.  I tried the first splitter.  It seemed... About the same.  Then I tried to disconnect and reconnect all the connections.  No dice.  Next up I wanted to remove the downstairs splitter in the basement.  This meant I would need to hook the modem up down in the basement...

Well... A little bit later I had an extension cable run from the nearest basement outlet, I removed the second splitter and put a shorter and nicer looking cable directly from the incoming cable connection to the cable modem.

BINGO!

It worked like a charm.

It's been up and running without a hiccup ever since.

I then connected the splitters back further downstream.  So now it comes right into the cable and then splits off to the other two TVs in the house.  I ran an ethernet cable up into the living room to feed the router and wifi and what not.

Not having reliable internet for just a few days drove me nuts.  I can't imagine it on the scale that Sister was emailing me about during the uptimes between downtimes.  We take reliable electricity and plumbing and water and internet for granted.  We don't know how well we have it.

It's something to really think about and consider and be thankful for.  So many people around the world don't have the same luxury.  But we don't think of it as luxury.  We think of it as a right, a need.

But it really makes our lives so much easier to have these things.  And it really puts us WAY ahead in learning and living.

Even if I couldn't fix my Comcast connection, I could have always just called them.  A phone call away.  But where the one professor is... She can't call anyone.  That's just how it is.  You can't get a tech out to re-run a line.

There's no other option.

Just something that I've been thinking about today.  I often feel kind of... guilty these days, I guess guilty is the word.  I live in a 4 bedroom house in the suburbs... alone.

Okay not ALONE... There are four cats too.  But still.  I just feel like, obnoxious.  I feel like I'm using up resources while other people are starving and don't even have clean water.

Meanwhile I could alternate showers in bathrooms each morning and I have three different toilets in which to go do my business.  I could fall asleep in four different bedrooms each night alternating.  I have a back porch the size of a football field to stretch out on in the morning sun and do yoga.  A nice little driveway that could fit three cars.  But it's just me parking my Honda Fit.

I don't know.  I mean... It just feels like... I'm being selfish I guess.  Some people are homeless.  I feel as though I should open up my extra rooms to shelter them.  Or I could just adopt every stray cat in town.

But ideally, eventually I'll downsize.  I'll sell the house and get something smaller.

I think often though about how what I have, so many around the world would dream of having just a fraction of it.

I think the key is just to remember what we have and be thankful for what we do have because there are people around the world with so much less.