Wrestling, puzzling, and more floor crawling

Sometimes it seems to be a false memory that I ran a house and family, and a job. these days the apparently simplest things turn into events of huge and time-consuming complexity.

Now that I have a nice new Internet Service Provider, and am almost of the stage of cancelling the old service, I would have thought life might have become simpler and easier. But No.

The technician put in a new phone and this promptly disable all the other phones in the rest of the house. It is a three story house with a lot of stairs, and it is simply not possible to b=get from the top story to the ground level before the phone call expired through effluxion of time. None of the other phones worked. How did it come that the technician did not think to ask or consider what other telephones would be affected.

Not being technically expert, and being far far away from those loved ones who could help, a certain amount of inexpert floundering took place. Eventually I realised that the previous mother phone, without which none of the other chicken phones would work, had been disabled and that the new one could not or would not talk to the rest of the house.

This sort of problem makes me rather prone to bad language and a certain amount of emotional distress. Finally I remembered that there was a phone in Dr P's old study which, if disconnected, rendered all the others dumb, silent and useless. Oh well, I thought, let me see if I can re-connect it. Perhaps if I could get this to work, all the baby phones would wake up and do their thing.

Now I NEVE EVER assume that it can't be too difficult a task. Experience has taught me otherwise. Thus began a series of trial crawlings  around the floors , the moving of furniture so that all the sockets could be reached and putting this into that and testing the phone lines. They remained adamantly dead.

Unfortunately such technical ability as I possess is easily challenged. I can start from a reasonably conceptually clear beginning, but by dint of more error than trial, I quickly become confused, and, worse, forget just what is was that I did only a minute ago.

I had been down to the new ISP service provider shop, and complained and sought help, but they said that what with all the heavy rain, they were fully occupied with serious emergency calls, and that, ergo, mine was not really serious or urgent, and they made an appointment for a couple of weeks from now, and warned me that if someone else (who might that be?) had caused the problem, they would charge me. I did point out that the technician should have thought to check what might have happened to all the other phones in the house when he connected the new one, but they did not sound too convinced or worried by this.

Thus I decided to take photos of the offending equipment and hied me to my local Retravision store, where George, David and Steve gathered around, gazed at my photos, had a man to man discussion of some length and depth, and finally sent me away equipped with a couple of connector thingies.

Back home I crawled around the floor once more, trying more seemingly endless combinations, and finally I seem to have managed to get the mother phone working again. So I took more photos, went back to Retravision, and returned the connector that was not needed, and went back home to have a nice glass of wine.

I just wish I had more technical ability, and did not get into such a flap and panic when things go wrong.

It gets very tedious, takes endless hours, gets sin the way of things which are far more interesting and enjoyable, and makes me deplorably prone to bemoan my lot and to wonder what will become of me.