But first I must check my email. Well, nothing extraordinary. A cousin, five times removed, wants to make sure I’ll be attending his art showing. An editor needs verification of my claim that computers require electricity. Some old girlfriend I haven’t heard from in 20 years writes to say she never wants to see me again. And then there’s the 60 or so messages promising more money and greater sexual satisfaction once I clear up the security problem with my account at a bank where I don’t bank.

In other words, it’s a typical morning.

But when I try to send out some email of my own, my client program, Lookout Regress, struggles for a full minute before telling me it can’t connect to the SMTP server, and suggests I click the Details button. I do, and a message pops up telling me it can’t connect to the SMTP server. I check a Web site. There’s nothing wrong with the Internet connection--I just can’t send mail.

I try another computer. Same problem. Okay, so the problem is definitely not in my PC.

Armed with that knowledge, I do the most logical thing: I reboot. That doesn’t solve the problem. So I reboot both PCs. No luck. I reboot the router and the DSL modem. The problem persists. I reboot my cell phone. Nope.

There’s nothing left to do but the most horrible, terrifying, and cringe-inducing repair option of them all: I call my ISP’s technical support line. After 20 minutes on hold, listening to their pre-recorded loop explaining why they offer the best customer service and technical support in the universe (the most horrible thought is that they may be right), a human being answers the phone.

After explaining the problem, refusing to reformat my hard drive, and explaining it again, she checks the connection on her end and declares everything honky-dory. Half an hour into the call, she suggests we go over my Lookout Regress server settings.

“They were working yesterday,” I pointed out. “I doubt the settings magically changed overnight--on two computers.”

“Of course not,” she replied, “but we changed the name of our SMTP server a few hours ago. The old settings don’t work. Come to think of it, that’s quite likely the problem.”

Very Hard Hard Copy

Five minutes later, my outgoing mail was uploaded and I was ready to work. I found a good, serious article on Street View I could use as a reference, and decided to print it for easier reading. I clicked my browser’s Print icon, the lights on my printer came alive, and I sat back and waited.

And waited.

Finally, the printer did something. Its LEDs changed from green to orange. And they blinked--two blinks, three blinks, five, seven, eleven. Was it my printer, or aliens trying to contact Carl Sagan?

I found the printer’s documentation. That blink pattern meant the printer was out of paper. I inserted more into the tray, and the printer shut down entirely.

So I tried printing the document again. I smiled as I heard it take one of the new sheets of paper out of the tray and into the printer’s bowels. Then it stopped, and the orange light started blinking a whole new pattern.

Back to the documentation. Paper jam. I unplugged the printer, opened it up, carefully removed the paper, closed the printer, plugged it in, and waited. Nothing happened.

So I clicked the browser’s Print icon. This time an actual line of text printed before the orange flashing. I recognized this pattern: It was out of ink.

So I ran down to my local supply store, Inkjet Extorium, laid out $73 for a new cartridge, came home, and installed it. As expected, the printer shut itself off.

I clicked the browser’s Print icon for the fourth time, and the eight-page article printed out without a problem. Then it printed out a second, third, and fourth time.

Well, not quite. The printer stopped on page seven of the fourth printing. It was out of ink.

Ignoring the printer, I read the article, marked it up, and decided I’d better actually spend some time on Street View before writing about it.

Internot

But when I tried Google Maps, I discovered that I no longer had an Internet connection.

For a man who doesn’t own a dictionary that isn’t online, this is a horrible situation. Maybe horrible isn’t the right word, but I don’t own a hard-copy thesaurus, either.

Once again, I did what I do best--I rebooted. Neither the Internet nor my confidence was restored during the 45 minutes I sat watching the “Shutting Down Windows” screen. I finally forced the PC off manually by holding down the Power button for five seconds. Then I turned it on, rebooted, and watched Windows refuse to boot.

After several attempts at getting the boot-with-F8 timing right, I got to the Boot Menu and selected Last Known Good Configuration, only to discover that there were no good configurations. For the last three months, it appears, System Restore has backed up nothing but cookies.

Totally desperate, I made one more attempt to do a plain, regular, vanilla boot. It worked.

Well, sort of. I still have no Internet access. And without Internet access, how can I research, then write about, anything?

So here I am, stuck. I have 900 funny words to write, and I have no idea what I’m going to write about.

© Copyright 2007 by Lincoln Spector