For Want of a Pin!
Just a quick post to say we’re still here, we just didn’t have internet for almost four days thanks to a perfect storm of bad luck:
On Friday I decided to bite the bullet and change our ISP from Internode to Dodo.But when the old connection was closed, the NBN modem would no longer ‘speak’ to our router [the router makes it possible for the Offspring and I to both use the internet at the same time]. Then we discovered that our mobile phones weren’t working properly either. Our mobile phone carrier uses the Optus network and apparently Optus has been doing some kind of repairs or upgrade. That meant our phones would cut out after a minute or two, or not connect at all so we couldn’t even call tech support.On Saturday, we masked up and went into the nearest shopping centre to change our mobile phones to Telstra because their network works. Huge thanks to the very knowledgeable young man who got both of our phones up and running again.Most of Sunday was spent with Dodo tech support who couldn’t get our hardware to work. I may be unkind but I suspect the people in that call centre were not fully trained in tech support. I’ll leave it at that.Late afternoon Sunday I cancelled the Dodo plan and the Offspring found Aussie Broadband via the phone. We signed up, but again nothing seemed to happen.This morning, Monday morning, we rang Aussie Broadband and after a bit of too-ing and fro-ing, we decided to try resetting the router. I thought you just unplugged the power cord, but no. You have to use a pin and stick it into a teeny hole at the back of the router for 20 seconds :
Lights went off, lights came on and…
IT WORKED!!!!
I think I shrieked. Thank you Aussie Broadband!
Our router is a Dlink, but I have to assume that all routers have one of these well hidden reset switches, so if your hardware won’t talk to each other, try the pin trick. 
Apart from that how-to trick, we’ve learned a number of life lessons as well:
make sure that at least one phone is working at all times,always keep a safety pin on hand because you never know when you’ll need to reset one of these blasted pieces of hardware,always keep some cash on hand.#3 hit us hard as we haven’t used cash since the start of the pandemic. Everything we buy is paid for by card, and we only put money on our cards when we intend to buy something. This is a security measure as we have to buy a lot of stuff online, and that means if our cards are hacked, we’ll only lose a small amount of money.
Anyway, we had just bought the groceries on Thursday so we had lots of food, but our cards were down to a couple of dollars. And with no internet, we couldn’t transfer money into them. -gnashes teeth-
Knowing we were low on petrol and might need to buy some after going to the shopping centre, we literally had to scavenge through the house, looking for spare change. We found $15 in twenty and fifty cent pieces. I am just grateful we didn’t have to buy petrol after all. That would have been incredibly …embarrassing.
I hope your weekend was better than ours!
deliriously happy to be back,
Meeks
