Back online

Well, it took 6 days, but my phone and internet are finally back up. After nobody showed up as scheduled on Friday, I waited over the weekend, then gave them a chance to come on Monday, and when that didn’t happen, I called yesterday (Tuesday) to check on the progress. Frustratingly, their records showed that someone did come out on Friday, identified some problem outside, and “handed it off to Maintenance,” whatever that meant, reporting the problem as fixed. They never actually contacted me to check whether it worked or not, which is upsetting.

So they scheduled another visit for today, and this time, fortunately, the tech actually arrived within the scheduled window and managed to fix the problem. Just in time, too, since I’d reached my monthly limit on my smartphone’s mobile data. For the second time, it was some kind of broken connection at a switching station miles away, so the tech had to call someone at that station, send a “buzzer” signal through my phone line for them to track, then wait for them to check through hundreds of connections to find the right one. But I’m finally back up and running, for now, at least. Hopefully that fiber optic upgrade the building manager promised will happen very soon.

Incidentally, I looked into the local news on Sunday, and it turns out that police blockade on the street by the library was due to a shooting, with the suspects still at large at the time. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so cavalier about walking around the block to find another route to the library.

Now that I have wi-fi again, I’m probably going to have to contact my PC’s customer service people. That thing where the PC freezes up with the power light on happened again, this time when I tried to hibernate it, rather than after a period of idleness. I decided to let it sit in frozen mode to see if it would automatically reboot as I suspected, but after an hour, it hadn’t, so I had to use the paper-clip reset button. It was warmer than usual during the time it was frozen, suggesting the auto-reboot might be an overheating thing. But when I checked the event viewer afterward, it showed no sign of any activity during that hour, as if it had been turned off. I wonder if the problem is with the power systems or something.