The Curse of Bragging About Good Fortune

I always cringe when the front doorbell rings. Nobody we know comes through the front door, so, as I rounded the corner to the foyer I had already decided the person standing on my porch was unwelcome. I opened the door and a perfectly benign fellow looked up from his clipboard, introduced himself as an employee of our electric company, and without pausing to take a breath, told me they’d just need to cut our power for about twenty seconds to get a few numbers off the back of our meter. “No,” I sighed, shaking my head. “Please don’t.” He smiled. “We’ll be quick, maybe only fifteen seconds. It will be right back on, I promise.” When I tried to explain It was the aftermath I was worried about, he chuckled. “I’m sure it will be fine. We’ll be out of your hair in no time,” he said, turning to jog down the steps. Yeah…well, it was anything but fine.

I wasn’t just speculating that we’d have problems. We lose power all the time; we’re pretty experienced at this. I suspect there are remote villages along the Amazon with more reliable electrical service than we have in our little town. We can count on outages during the horrible thunderstorms or extremely high winds we seem to suffer ridiculously often. That’s sort of understandable. But we also lose power under sunny blue skies ten times more often than we do in bad weather. One year I kept track and we averaged 2.8 outages a month. And it doesn’t matter if it’s out for seconds or for days, there are always consequences. Sometimes they’re just nuisance things like resetting every appliance or electronic device with a clock. But many times they’re worse. And sometimes they’re disastrous. You see, it is no great feat for power to go off and then come on again. What has proven in our case to be the miracle, is for everything that depends on power to come back on once the power does.

Let me digress for a moment. Think about when you’re watching a football game and the announcers start bragging about an accomplishment of a particular player; like a quarterback that hasn’t thrown an interception in 200 passes. What happens? The quarterback throws an interception on the next play. Or they point out a particular basketball player that hasn’t missed a free throw in ten games. Of course, he’s going to miss the next one. It’s a curse.

So, what would you think was going to happen, if just hours before Mr. It Should Be No Problem to Turn Your Power Off stood on my porch, I had been bragging about how reliable our internet has been for the last year? And it wasn’t just that morning; for some very idiotic reason, I had bragged about it several times over the last week or so. Yep, you guessed it…I cursed us.

The only thing worse than the performance of our electric service is our internet service. Like the inconsistency in our power, there’s rarely an identifiable reason when it goes down. That is, unless there’s any blip at all in our electric current, and then we can count on it to jump right on the outage bandwagon. With the help of a string of sometimes endearing, but always peculiar techy types, we’d been playing whack-a-mole with our internet problems for the better part of ten years. That was until the last year or so when our fortunes seem to change. And then I cursed us.

Remember the good old 90s when we just dialed it up? It so simple in the beginning, we only needed it to go to one place – the one computer that everyone in the house shared? Well, those days are clearly long gone and now it just needs to be everywhere. But for some mysterious reason, our home presents barriers to that. Several years ago, when our guest complaints regarding signal strength and dead zones started escalating it was obvious our trial and error approach was not working. We finally called together the best available minds in Vonore, Tennessee and instructed them to stop thinking of this as a home and think of it as a hotel. Their assignment was clear: assume lots of people are everywhere in the house with multiple devices and just make it work. They started hauling in new modems, routers, signal extenders and boosters and the end result was pretty good. It took that summer season to work out the kinks and finally we seemed to have a WiFi solution that worked.

Keeping it working was still a challenge, but over the next year we developed some safety nets that included the use of some strategically placed UPS batter backups to help with the power outages. And we had a fairly effective routine in place to take the system down after an outage and bring it back up in a sequence that seemed to work…most of the time anyway.

Fast forward to our “it’s only twenty seconds – should be no problem” outage coming on the heels of my self-imposed curse. Well, as promised, the power came right back. As did everything else… except for the internet. We completed the normal re-start routine and still no internet. I dug out the old Dell laptop that I use as a signal tester and hoofed it down to the utility room to determine the source of the problem. If we aren’t getting a signal out of the modem – that’s on Comcast or Xfinity or whatever they call themselves these days. Beyond that, it’s on us.

Turns out our little outage blew out the modem. In fairness, this twentieth power failure of the year was probably just the straw that broke the camel’s – or in this case modem’s – back. And let’s not forget that curse thing. So, we called Comcast and after jumping through their diagnostic hoops they scheduled a service call to replace the modem that we had told them hours before needed to be replaced.

Two days later our favorite Comcast employee showed up at the door with a new modem. Yay! But the new Comcast modems come with a built-in router. So, when he replaced the modem, he also replaced our master router. Without the slightest consideration that we were operating under a curse, he proudly connected our kludgy network to his spanking new equipment. Yikes!

Needless to say, it wasn’t plug and play. And bad news for us. A viable signal was coming out of the modem and it was our problem that our network didn’t like it; Comcast was off the hook. I mentioned this fellow was our favorite, a designation he’s earned over the years because he really tries to make it all work. When he saw my exasperation turn to desperation, he did just that, spending the next few hours going room to room working with us to get everything up and running. By the time he left we were pretty much there.

I was testing the signal strength on the porch to make sure it could handle multiple devices, when he came back in the house. “Hey, I was calling all this in and I need to get a few readings off the box out front, so I’ll just take it down and bring it right back up.” Oh, wow. First a curse and now déjà vu. My heart sunk; there’s no recovering from that combination.

“No, please don’t do that,” I begged for the second time that week. To his credit, he didn’t laugh like the other guy; he knew me well enough to know I’d lose it. “I’ll be careful and this modem can handle it. It’s brand new. I really have to do it,” he said, apologetically. Obviously, it’s their box; I really couldn’t stop him. So, I crossed my fingers and prayed that we had suffered enough to satisfy the curse.

Frustrating story short, the curse lives and we’re back in internet limbo. After several days of our own feeble attempts at troubleshooting the situation, we have WiFi in about half the house. Unfortunately, it’s not the half that we use most. More disturbing, there seems to be some gremlin that rudely redirects most of my internet searches to a website that has something to do with the settings for our routers. I thought unplugging our inactive routers would solve that issue, and it did for a day. But it found me this morning and I’m once again hostage to this maddening WiFi genie. The internet gods are clearly sending a signal that I’m incapable of understanding and at this moment, I’m choosing to just give up on the whole thing.

The mastermind behind our suddenly outdated network is missing in action. It is after all a holiday weekend and I’m sure he’s at some traditional gathering of geeks enjoying the unofficial end of summer. Fortunately, we have a brave soul, completely new to our situation, stopping by today that claims he can rescue us from our latest internet nightmare. I’d like to be optimistic, but the little voice in my head keeps reminding me of the many well-intended people over the years that have spent hours trying to remedy our predicament only to leave us in a worse situation.

In a few hours, it will be better or it will be worse. But I’ll promise one thing, if we’re lucky enough to get back to our previous WiFi bliss, I’ll never mention it again.