I got them Digital Blues today

Yesiree – If the internet is the information superhighway, I’m currently parked up on the hard shoulder with four flat tyres.

When I moved to my current South Cumbrian abode, less than a decade ago, I used to have to unravel a very long phone extension cable from a reel and stretch it from a socket upstairs all the way to the back of the house where the computer hung around, sulking at being kept away from all the good stuff online.

This process was bad enough (the windy handle on the reel had broken off from over-use, so ‘browsing blisters’ were a distinct possibility), but even when the cables were all connected, the dial-up modem allowed a pipeline of data to rush into the house at a speed so great that being emailed a photo meant I could comfortably watch all the Star Trek movies back to back before going back to see if it had finished downloading.

That’s assuming the connection hadn’t dropped out just before it finished, then started all over again, of course.

How quickly we forget. The speedy broadband we got revolutionised our ability to sit around and waste inordinate amounts of time looking at mildly amusing cat videos on YouTube, Tweet about cat videos, and carry on wandering aimlessly around the web even when there wasn’t actually anything we wanted to see, just because we could.

So when our connectivity changed into pain in the neck-tivity a few weeks ago, it came as quite a shock. Like Mr Pavlov’s dogs, we currently sit obediently hoping for a steady blue light on the hub that lasts long enough to actually load something. With associated whimpering noises.

The baffled hub is in a constant state of surprise as it gazes mournfully down the phone line for some data, thinks it’s got some, then repeats the whole process over and over, with a corresponding blinking light show. As it sits next to the bed, we’ve had to stick tape over it at night as I kept having nightmares about being attacked by a malevolent Christmas tree.

It’s winking lights are a sad beacon to the world, forlornly advising that we’re offline. If it could rock gently backwards and forwards, I suspect it would be.
v When it does occasionally work, its pot luck if there’s enough time for some Tweets to flutter in, actual post arrives faster than emails, and any video we try to watch has more excessively long dramatic pauses than an Eastenders omnibus marathon.

Things got so bad last Sunday that I actually had to go outside and clean the car. It’s a sort of metallic, silvery, blue colour. Who knew? I thought it was matt grey/brown.

Anyway, I can cope. I haven’t become so reliant on permanently being hooked up to the web that I can’t go 5 minutes without loo... Oo, hang on – it’s back on!

Gotta go. Funny cat videos need watching.

This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 28th of August 2015. Fancy a look at it on their website? OK, here you go... The paper retitled it "Trying in vain to beat digital blues".

This is the column I wrote a couple of weeks ago that should have appeared in the paper on the 21st, but got bumped by levitating teenagers. My not-a-column post on that very subject that I wrote to fill the void garnered an interesting response and featured in a photography i-paper too. I was in good company on that one - the always entertaining The Poke carried a strangely similar piece at around the same time, with a near identical theme about teenagers jumping in the air needing to be attractive. Small world...

Remarkably, despite three engineer visits and numerous lengthy conversations with a call centre in India, our Broadband is still seriously on the blink, and this is the first decent bit of up-time we've had today. 

I could write a column a week for the next month on the complete absence of customer care and utter lack of communication between call centre and engineers, but a small pertinent example would be India calling me to see if the problem was all sorted now whilst the engineer was still working. Gah.

This one will (and I have a rising sense of despair about it) run and run, I suspect, unlike data into my home.

(CD A-Z now up to the letter B, and the Bangles' "Different Light" from 1985.)