Land of Convenience 2

“Ahh mate, it’s the land of convenience”.  Glenn’s words were ringing in my ears as I sat down at my laptop, once again, on my day off.  He was here before the internet was a thing. Though there are definitely a lot of convenience stores, at least 4 within 100m of our apartment.  I’d been following this routine for 2 weeks. Time off equals trying to get the wifi working so Susan can access the internet from her laptop.  The current ethernet arrangement was wearing thin as it only worked on my computer.  After being quoted Y17 000 to have someone come and sort it out, I was feeling determined to resolve the issue myself.  Anyway I didn’t feel too useless – Stephen, a smart young guy I met at work last week, said it took him 6 weeks to sort it out, and he’s got a degree in mechanical engineering.

So I began my ritual again with a renewed sense of purpose.  Laptop connected to wifi, wifi connected to router site/settings but not the internet.  I opened the browser on my phone to see where I’d gotten to last night.  I’d been searching the help sites, “can’t connect wifi to internet, try these 10 steps”, etc., etc.  Where was I?  Ahh yes, this site from last night seems particularly apt – the 12 steps, after all I’d consumed most of a bottle of whisky during my attempts this past week.  My phone goes from browser to google translate camera mode, back and forth as I read the tips then try to decipher anything in the all Japanese language settings that looks familiar. 

Thankfully I was past the ‘pull your hair out phase’ and was feeling strangely at ease.  I began casting my I-phone enabled eye over the top of yet another setting page and saw the words “How do you want to connect to the internet”. I turned to the check box options to find the ‘with ease and simplicity’ box.  No such luck, but I did notice that it was set to automatic – sounds reasonable enough.  As I moved my phone across the page, watching Kanji, Katakana and Hiragana slowly become English, I saw the characters PPPoE6, or some such, as a connection option.  These vague characters somehow resonated and, as I stared at them, they took on a kind of numinous quality.  Without waiting any further I checked that box. Up came the user and password page, at least I knew what to do here. Then I hit ‘set’ – 90 second wait, an actual countdown on the screen. 5,4,3,2,1, then glanced down at my wifi bars, the yellow dot was gone.  “Susan can you please try the wifi on your computer”, further waiting.  “Oh, oh, what did you do to get it to work?”

Where’s the last of that whisky?