Dear Diary: Frazzled to a Crisp: The Etiology
Here’s what happened:
¶ Saturday: I forgot to turn off the window unit in the blue room before running the electronic broom (not even a vacuum cleaner!) over the carpet. This threw the circuit breaker — largely because, I’m reminded, I’ve got a thousand peripherals plugged in in here. Not to mention the two monitors: it used to blow out when I had only one.
No big deal, but, with the power back on, the modem wouldn’t work. Big deal. Much sweating and agonizing between recognizing modem problem and, realizing that I ought to unplug the power supply as well as the modem, fixing it.
¶ Sunday: Uneventful, until —
¶ First thing Monday morning: Kathleen said, “By the way, the browsers on my laptop keep clicking through to some malware site.” The Malware Abyssal opened up beneath me!
¶ Last thing Monday night, the cable connection disappeared. If it hadn’t been for previous events, I’d have understood what was happening — a neighborhood-wide outage — but, instead, I was sure that I’d Done Something. I hadn’t, though; very late, I went to bed relieved to have a restored connection. (Meanwhile, thank heaven for Mi-Fi!)
¶ Tuesday: Done Nothing? Ha! Realized at about 11 AM that, in the course of rooting around behind the CPU last night, trying to figure out how I had caused the connection outage, so that I could fix it, I had unplugged the speaker jack.
¶ Hooking up the speaker jack wasn’t enough. Rebooting required. Upon rebooting: no monitor connection!
¶ Tightened monitor plugs. Rebooted. Happiness.
I have omitted the part about updated wi-fi drivers, which really did improve conditions, when, at least, there were conditions (an Internet connection) to improve upon. Also, Kathleen’s browser problem was fixed — for the time being. These good things were not of my doing.
When all of this started, all I wanted to do was to watch Coma (a fave). Long before it was over, I just wanted to be in it. Paging Dr Harris!