Pat Bean's blog

Murphy’s Laws: If something can go wrong, it will; The chance of the bread falling with the buttered side down is directly proportional to the cost of the carpet; Technology is dominated by those who manage what they do not understand….

It's cold and rainy here at Lake Walcott this morning, but Maggie, who cares nothing about computer problems, sleeps the morning away. -- Photo by Pat Bean

Travels With Maggie

A quirky problem with my Verizon air card the first week of May suddenly blocked me from accessing the online home pages of Story Circle Network, the women’s writing support group to which I belong.

It took a couple of weeks, and over an hour on the phone with a Verizon techie, to determine it was a service provider blip. That was confirmed when the techie duplicated my air card set up and he, too, couldn’t access the Story Circle pages.

Verizon is still working on a fix, or so they say.

In the meantime, my four-year-old laptop died on me. I decided, since I had to purchase a new computer, why not just upgrade my air card at the same time. Surely that would solve the problem.

I patted myself on the back for thinking of it, then shelled out $129 for a new card because I didn’t yet qualify for an upgrade.

All the time that trouble-maker, Murphy, whom my grandmother really believed existed, was laughing at me. The upgrade card wouldn’t access the site either. Grrrr…..

Well, she did wake up from her snooze on the couch long enough to give me a dirty look after the camera flash woke her. -- Photo by Pat Bean

There was still some warm sunshine on my shoulder, however. With the help of my geeky Ogden friend, and a couple of Jack and Cokes to ease the transition, all the files on my old computer were transferred to the new one and it, at least, was working perfectly.

Of course I didn’t know then that Murphy was going to hitch a ride with me back to Lake Walcott.

While my old air card had four bars of connection to the world at the remote state park, the new one had half a bar. Not only could I just barely get connected, the connection almost immediately fizzled. The message, when things went awry, was “the remote computer is not responding.”

I suspected a Verizon tower might just be temporarily down, so I gave it 24 hours before I was back on the phone with another techie.

He tried numerous unsuccessful fixes – as I sat in front of my computer amazed at what they can do remotely these days. When nothing worked, the techie gave up and reactivated my old air card.

I immediately had four green bars of connectivity showing, which goes to show newer is not always better.

The techie said the antenna on the new card was probably a lemon, and he asked if I wanted him to send me a new one.

Nope, I said. I’ll just take a refund. As my grandmother said, when something’s not broke, don’t fix it.

Now if Murphy will just stop pestering those Verizon techies, maybe I’ll once again be able to connect to my Story Circle web sites.