On Thursday Michele yelled up the stairs to me. We have an intercom system on the phones, but she can never remember how to use it. So she walks from one end of the downstairs to the other to yell up the stairs to me whenever she needs something. My desk is at the top of the stairs, and I can hear her fine from there.

“Joanna?”

“Yo.”

“Have you been having trouble with your applications this morning?”

“My applications?”

“I’ve been having horrible problems with Firefox and InfoSelect. Do you think it’s the wind?”

“Uh, why would the wind…nevermind.* Have you restarted your computer?”

“No, I probably should have done that first.”

“If you’re still having problems after you restart, I’ll be happy to try to fix them.”

I didn’t hear of any further problems after that until the next morning.

“Joanna?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m having horrible problems with Firefox.”

“Firefox just installed a new update, so you should be better soon.”

“Okay.”

I sat down at my computer for the first time. On Fridays I clean the house, so I hadn’t been doing my usual scouring of the Internet. Sure enough, the load times on major sites I visit every day were unreasonably sluggish. I checked my bandwidth, which was much slower than usual.

So I called Qwest. I hate talking to tech support people. He had me turn the modem off and back on again, which worked remarkable well, once I plugged the Ethernet cable back in after it had become unhooked from the modem to the router when he had me turn the modem around to find out what model it was. I really should replace that cable.

“What was wrong?” asked Michele.

“We had to turn the modem off and back on again.

“Everyone had to get out of the car and get back in?”

“Exactly.”

She was referring to this joke. There are three engineers in a car; an electrical engineer, a chemical engineer and a Microsoft engineer.

Suddenly the car just stops by the side of the road, and the three engineers look at each other wondering what could be wrong. The electrical engineer suggests stripping down the electronics of the car and trying to trace where a fault might have occurred. The chemical engineer, not knowing much about cars, suggests that maybe the fuel is becoming emulsified and getting blocked somewhere.

Then, the Microsoft engineer, not knowing much about anything, comes up with a suggestion “Why don’t close all the windows, get out, get back in, then open the windows again, and maybe it’ll work!?”

Here’s a conversation I had with Duncan recently:

“Joanna, Outlook isn’t working right.”

“Did you restart the computer?”

“Yes! Three times!”

I wasn’t sure I should be happy he’d restarted it before coming to me or to tell him the definition of insanity. Instead I just sighed and fiddled with stuff until it started working again.

Yes, I am the IT department.

*The house is in the middle of nowhere, and up until recently the only broadband we could get was either satellite or line of sight. Our line of sight antenna would jiggle whenever it was windy, making our Internet connection go in and out. In March the Chinook winds come. This whole last week the wind was blowing at about 40 miles per hour constantly.

But we’ve had DSL for 2 years now.