Point To Point

I spent the fiftieth anniversary of man's first steps on the moon by sitting in front of a computer, waiting for a sign that all of the technology that surrounded me, on the desk, on the floor, extending off into the rest of the house. Communications, connections to satellites and all manner of other peripherals made possible, in part, by our exploration of space.

And yet, there I sat, trapped in the front of my house as I attempted to sort out the best intentions of customer support personnel who desperately wanted to help me. But they didn't. Exactly. Instead, I was tossed from one nasty flurry of hold music to another as a number of different companies tried to explain to me just exactly why it wasn't their portion of the Internet connection I was trying to establish. You should try calling the folks at Comcast. 

No. You should try asking Netgear. They'll help you.

Sounds like the trouble is coming from those Google pucks. 

I know! Let's ask Mister Owl. 

Because the eighteen hours that I spent trying to sort out the angular bits of misinformation would have been better spent sucking on a series of Tootsie Pops. As it turns out, somewhere around  the time I was sold the new cable modem that was purchased to replace the rental unit Comcast had me paying thirteen dollars a month for all eternity, someone might have mentioned that this was in fact not an actual replacement for that item. I went home and attempted to plug and play and I did the one but not the other. What followed was a whole lot of plugging and unplugging, always at the behest of one of the far-flung voices of quiet reason from call centers designed from my perspective to challenge my patience and intellect. 

We can put a man on the moon, several times in fact, but we can't just buy a new cable modem and get it to work without first spending nearly an entire day talking about how it really should work. But it doesn't. Until somewhere in the eighteenth hour, the revelation comes that there is a reason why this box with wires isn't letting the other boxes with wires talk to one another: That's not exactly what it was built for in the first place. Turns out that all these tech types, myself included, never brushed up against the idea that maybe there needed to be another piece of equipment that would allow the machines to see one another. The piece of equipment that was sitting in my basement, waiting for that chance to land a man  on the moon. 

Or allow me to watch YouTube videos of the Moon Landing. Fifty years? Eighteen hours? At last, there was triumph for all mankind.