Lycanthropia

About 2:00 this afternoon my Internet connection died. And I do mean died. Flatline.

I live in an area where outages are now a rarity, and when the cable modem goes down, it’s usually back up within 15 minutes to an hour. Not to worry. I go for a long walk with the dog, read a Sherlock Holmes story, take a union break and I’m back at work.

Unfortunately, I am one of those journal-keepers who has become completely dependent on the Web for both source and reference materials. When my feed stops, it’s like I’ve been tossed into the Black Hole of Calcutta. There is both no input and no output.

So I telephoned my cable company (which, in spite of price-gouging, is a pretty decent, reliable service) and told the tech support representative (I pictured him as a twenty-something just-out-of-college geek) I was dead.

“Do you mean dead like your 98-year-old grandmother eating Meals on Wheels dead? Or dead like stone cold in the grave dead?” the technician wanted to know.

“I mean dead as in fish out of water dead,” I told him. Which is about as apt a description as any I could have given.

“One moment, sir,” he replied. I could hear him taking the Dead as a Fish Out of Water Dead reference off the shelf and thumbing through its pages.

“Ah,” he said a moment and several pages later. “We’ll have to send a technician to your home. This is your ticket number. Do you have a pencil? 820225.”

I faithfully wrote down the figure. “Are you telling me I’m the only dead modem on the block?” I asked.

“Sir,” said the technician. “You’re the only dead fish in the city, far as I can tell.”

And stinking up the neighborhood, I added to myself.

The technician arrived around 8:30 p.m. He had a toolbelt around his waist and a lot of electronic gizmos hanging from his neck. He pulled wires out of the back of my modem, clipped their stingers, toyed with some expensive-looking tools and talked into a hand-held two-way radio that looked suspiciously like a cell phone on steroids.

“Everything looks fine here,” he said. But he was still getting no signal. “Guess I’ll have to check the pole.”

So he did. He came down a few minutes later with what looked like a bit of charred fur in his hands.

“Squirrel,” he said. “Chewed through the wiring. Just enough to take down the modem, but not enough to stop your television signal. Fried the little bugger, too. Strange, huh?”

Strange indeed, I agreed. One trashed dead squirrel carcass later, I’m back in business, my cable modem humming along like a champ.

In any case, this is the long version of a short answer. When asked, “Why isn’t there a new entry tonight?” my answer is:

“Because a squirrel ate my homework.”

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