Yesterday afternoon I made the mistake of going shopping. Other than the Ashwaubenon branch library I went only to Vanderloop Shoes and Kimps Hardware, places where old customers are treated with toleration and where I found fully half the items on my list, I am sure all the subsequent problems can be blamed entirely on this crack in my fortification against commercial enterprise.
At about 15:44 I returned to my computer intending to connect with the events happening beyond the boundaries of public-facing businesses. (Why did I yield to this thought? Just a few more hours of ignorance might have resulted in a happier evening and a more restful night.) I may have asked to see the UPI news site or perhaps it was some other page. The point is whatever I asked for could not be found.
"Hmm." said the Firefox browser. "I'm having trouble with your internet connection. Here are some things you can try: Buy a smartphone and use that. Go for a long walk with your dog. Become a hermit and cut off all interaction with humanity." I may not be quoting the browser message exactly.
Compounding my situation I looked up the phone number for the tedious support line. "Welcome to tedious support," the telephone said. "If you are calling for tedious support press a number. Otherwise press a different number or stay on the line until we get around to you."
Next, a different message in a different voice was played. It said, "There uh curr m ly anout age m duh ruh of. Tedious is aware of this oht age and wiff tive kig it. The next update will be in May." Again, I may not have an exact quotation.
Eventually a person came on the line. Unfortunately I recognized her voice from a previous interaction but what could I do? I tried to mitigate the situation by limiting the scope of inquiry. "I heard the recorded message," I told her, "but I was not able to understand it. Could you confirm that the known outage is affecting me?" In this wonderful computer age in which we live it is only a 3 or 4 minute wait for the human to shuffle through the instantly available outage data and return with the assurance that I was not part of any current outage.
"Oh ..." I responded being taken aback. "I guess we need to record a new outage since I am clearly not getting service." The poorly informed human had me wait for another 3 or 4 minutes while she ran some tests. More accurately she asked the system to display some data it already had but she has been trained to think it was performing a highly technical verification of operational status. "The system check shows 2 devices are connected and active: 'MyComputer' and 'Thing'. It is showing no problems."
Thing is not Thing of "The Addams Family" but one of the "Internet of Things" things, specifically my solar panels.
I was at a loss. How could I explain to the tedious help desk the difference between a cut cable interruption and a non-working domain name server? She would have to understand what an internet domain is (like my website or a news service) and how a domain is given a name (like PivotRock.net or APnews.com) and how MyComputer has to ask a Domain Name Server for an Internet Protocol number (like 173.231.241.69) for each of the each names before it can send an http GET request for the page or picture I want. The tedious domain name server was not responding with the IP number so the browser could not request a page.
I mean ... sure, I can explain the internet to a high school student. Educating a full-time employee of a technology provider is beyond my ability. In actual reality.