What do you mean there's no Internet?!

As disasters go, the events of the past few weeks have been tame when compared to floods, earthquakes and the like. For the inhabitants of our little house, however, it's been a kind of 'asteroid-hits-the-planet' calamity.

It began with a small blip of a nuisance - the router had a 'bad day' and had to be switched off and on more then once. We laughed about it - silly router had a little huffy fit, that's all.

A few days later we woke up with no wi-fi anywhere in the house. There were a few minutes of blind panic where everyone fired up their individual devices and went 'Huh?!' The router was switched off and on, we all noted how hot it was and figured that the poor thing must have simply overheated. It was decided that the router should remain switched off until it cooled down and, after a couple of hours of us all wandering around trying to figure out what to do with ourselves, we switched it back on and - phew! - normal service had resumed.

All was right with the world again.

Except it wasn't - this pattern continued for a few days with increasing frequency and the worry and concern turned into anger. I called the ISP, spent half an hour on the phone with a poor lady who wanted to me to keep telling her which lights were on and which were off, how fast they were blinking, was there any change now? Now? Change the filter. No difference. Change all the filters in the house. Really? Ok but no change. Unscrew the front of the socket and plug the router directly into the....Are you kidding me? Fine, unplug everything for 48 hours and it should be ok.

48 hours later it was definitely NOT okay - on the router, there was one solitary light blinking on and off in a pattern of desolate loneliness so I called the ISP again. 'Try this', the man ion the other end of the phone suggested and talked me through rebooting the router and resetting the factory settings. OK, there are lots of happy little lights on now. Yippee!

All was right with the world again.

For two days.

I was rudely awakened from a dream about sewing books together to make a computer (I kid you not) by child number one's anguished cry of 'What do you mean there's no Internet?' Hubby and children were in the kitchen looking shell-shocked and depressed. "Mum!" cried child number two, "There's no Internet connection at all - we're UNCONNECTED!"

NOOOOOOOOOOO!

'We'll send you a new router,' the ISP folk promised, it should be there in a few days. With bank holidays in the way, it took over a week and for the first few days we were a family adrift from our usual routines and connections. Child number one and I decided to re-read some books, child number two went out to play football, hubby headed off to the gym. It was a kind of old-fashioned, back-to-basics kind of connecting which I realised I'd kind of missed.

And now we're back on line, connected again to the wonders of the world wide web and our online, far away friends. It was a very long 'week and a bit' without Google and Facebook and Twitter and Blogger and all those other little bits and pieces that make up my day-to-day existence. I missed them, missed a lot of people that I chat to every day in some form or another but will probably never meet but I realised that, if the unthinkable happened and the web of wonders disintegrated, I would survive but my world-view and my circle of friends would shrink a HUGE amount. (Hmmmm...there may just be a future book in that!)

Plus, I wouldn't get directed to things like this:

Thank you very much legogenie123! That's AMAZING!!!