Computer glitch brings household to a halt

A simple glitch late Saturday afternoon almost brought our household to a grinding halt. My wife noticed that our Internet connection was down. No e-mail. No Web surfing. No connection to the "outside world" — unless you count the telephone and cable television, which we weren't. She walked her way through the diagnostics to check the computer's Internet connection to no avail. I also checked the connection without finding the problem, and I went upstairs to check the other computer to see if it might still be connected. It wasn't, so the problem was not just in our "main" computer but had to be in the cable modem or the wireless router that kept our two household computers, plus my wife's work laptop that she uses more and more often at night to complete job-related tasks, connected to the world.

With a nice dinner with our son and daughter-in-law and grandchildren and a national basketball semi-final game awaiting us, we decided to wait until morning to try to fix our computer problem. But it nagged at me through the night and was among my first thoughts on Sunday morning. We keep our downstairs computer going 24/7. No one walks past the computer (in a high-traffic corner) without checking to see if any e-mail has arrived. We habitually check the weather (our browser's home page), and my wife will check for any activity on her social networking site. I check for any comments posted to this blog several times a day. And I do nearly daily searches of job listing in my search for a new career.

We're hooked on high-speed Internet. We might be able to give up cable TV (now that college basketball season is nearly over and college football hasn't begun). We might even get by without a land-line telephone. I might even give up my cell phone. But not high-speed Internet. We use it to send and receive photos, to communicate with children and other relatives in distant locales. When we can't remember something or don't know the answer or want to know more about anything, we "google it." And there are a gazillion YouTube videos I haven't seen yet (I was just watching the Dave Brubeck Quartet playing "Take Five," "Blue Rondo a la Turk" and "Unsquare Dance").

Our computers have been reliable. We bought a cast-off Macintosh from my newspaper employer 10 or 12 years ago and have been Mac people since then (though my wife works in Windows at her job). The computer on which this is being written is 7 or 8 years old and has never given us any trouble. We bought our "new" computer about five years ago to get the new features (a DVD burner and faster processor) that we wanted. I added a wireless card to this computer and bought a wireless router so that we could have Internet access on both computers. It's not unusual to find both of us on the Internet at the same time. 

Sunday morning I sat down at the computer and called our Internet provider. Because it was before 7 a.m., I was quickly connected to a tech person, who began walking me through the diagnostics. As I was about to follow her directive to restart the wireless router, I found the trouble: The ethernet cable from the modem to the router had come loose. Although I had checked the connection before, the looseness had gone unnoticed. I reseated the cable. Problem solved.

We are connected again. Hallelujah!