My devices decided that my bank account was getting too full of itself

Here’s the kicker: I took my antique computer modem to one of my Internet Service Provider’s shops to exchange it for a newer model. The guy at the store saw me coming in and said, “You’re going to hate me. I may not be able to help you.”

The internet in the store was down.

In summary: the internet was down at my internet provider.

It all started on a cold night a few weeks ago when everything seemed to be working on our stove except for the fact that the house was getting colder. A mechanic came out to inspect it and gave us the sad news that our stove had a small electrical fire.

The good news is that everything worked as it should and the house didn’t catch fire – although the circuit breaker literally melted.

The bad news is that it would cost a small fortune to replace — and they couldn’t fit it in the attic where the old one was, so they’d have to install a new unit in the tiny laundry room.

The company didn’t have the parts in stock so we had to wait a few weeks to get the oven. Luckily the temperature was unusually mild for the time of year the whole time.

While we were waiting for the oven, our wall oven stopped working (note: that’s not entirely true. The oven broke just before the oven, but that’s a better story). Another mechanic came out and said the problem was just the heating element. It would be an easy fix for not a lot of money, and it wasn’t a big deal.

When the guy came out to fix the heating element he found that the problem wasn’t with the element but with the computer board and they no longer make that particular computer board. We’d need a whole new oven, which would still cost a small fortune.

That got us thinking. We have two ovens, one in the wall and one in the oven. I don’t bake as much as I used to, sigh, so we don’t actually need both. My wife hates our stove (long story) so instead of spending a small fortune on a wall oven we could spend a small fortune on a new stove.

But I’m a bit of a geek when it comes to my cooking appliances, so I want a very nice stove. That would mean spending a larger small fortune on the stove than the smaller small fortune we would spend on the wall oven, so we’ll probably just end up with a new wall oven.

Meanwhile, the oven people have shown up and installed a combination oven/air conditioner/humidifier in the laundry room — and it’s noisy. It is very loud. It’s 737 loud, especially the humidifier. Also, it regularly makes an odd whistling sound that never quite approaches a melody.

While they were installing it the internet to our office went down. I’m not saying the installers caused the problem. Just saying the internet was working before they turned off the power to install the oven and when they turned it back on it wasn’t working.

I live in a shotgun style house, long and narrow. The computer connections are inevitably at one end in the basement. The office is inevitably at the other end on the second floor. A router can’t send a signal that far, so we had used some kind of magical device to send our internet signal through the power wires.

I went to the computer store. I asked if they had extra long range routers (no). I asked if I should get another magical device to send an internet signal through the electrical wires (no, because they can break when oven people turn the power off and on again).

The guy from the computer store said what I need is a mesh system that essentially routes the WiFi signal from one part of the house to another part of the house. And as I was typing that, I remembered that we had a mesh system before and it wasn’t working very well, so we went with the magic wire thing.

Anyway I bought it. And it cost a small fortune.

I tried to install it and of course it didn’t work. Instead of having internet on the first floor, which we had before I tried to install it, we had no internet at all. Also, we had no phone service.

Everything became clear. The problem was not with the router, but with the modem. I took the modem to the internet shop to exchange it for a new one.

The guy in the store said, “You’re going to hate me.”