At last, success

But at a cost of several hours and a lot of stress on my part.

So, when we left our heroine (yeah right), she was preparing to run down to the nearby computer shop in hopes of them either fixing the broken Belkin router or being able to sell her a nearly-identical one.

Apparently service has....gone downhill a bit...since I last used them. The guy was like "Uhhhhhh....it could either be that you reset something in your computer that throttles the signal* or maybe the thing is, I don't know, losing signal?"

(*Oh, I don't THINK so. For one thing, I haven't screwed with anything on the computer, for another, when I was hardwiring in, there was no signal loss)

And I, just wanting the problem FIXED already, asked if I could replace the router.

"Yeah, you can go to wal-mart, they have lots of them."

"So, you don't sell them any more?" I asked, looking at a cabinet full of them (???) behind the guy.

"No, if we need them, we usually...uhhhh...just order them."

Okay, FINE.

So then I said: "So is Belkin the best brand or what?" And he kind of grudgingly said yes, though that was the brand in the case behind him, and the one I got LAST time.

So, FINE, okay, I go to Wal-mart. You don't want my money, small business? FINE. Anyway, I needed milk, it's supposed to be crappy this weekend so I need food on hand.

So I went to wal-mart. Walked over to the electronics section. Saw not only just one brand of router, just one KIND of router - a NetGear.

Surely, surely, they have more than one type of router?

So I waited for The Guy who worked there to finish up with someone else, when he did, I stepped forward and started to ask my question....

And an older woman - older than I am - PUSHED HER CART BETWEEN WHERE HE WAS STANDING AND I WAS STANDING (like, three feet apart) and stepped in front of me and ASKED HIM A QUESTION ABOUT CELL PHONES.

I think he saw the look of bewilderment-shading-into-anger in my face - I had, as I noted, hung back and waited to be sure he was finished helping the person before me - and he managed to send her off quickly.

But yeah, great. I know I'm freaking invisible, world, and I don't matter, I don't need it emphasized to me.

(Yes, charitable explanation: she couldn't hear me; sometimes I am a bit soft-spoken for my own good. Or she was really deeply worried and needed help with the phone NOW and decided to push forward. I don't know)

But he took me over to The Wall and showed me what they had - mostly souped-up things for gaming or those kind of smart-home things where all your appliances do stuff like say, "Dirty feet, muddy feet, wipe your feet, please, be neat" to you. I have one (1) computer and one (1) printer that I want to network. That's it. I have a dumbphone and a dumb thermostat and my fridge is from 2001 and my washer and dryer are even older than that and I don't want appliances that spy on me any way.
And then he said, "But, I don't really recommend these if you want it just to connect a computer and printer to the internet" (which is what I had said I wanted). And he pulled out a smaller, plainer one- NetGear brand. (Like the ones they had on the endcap, the ones I saw first, but a bit better and nicer).

"I should be able to set this up myself, right?" I asked. "Oh yeah," he responded, "It's largely automatic and there are also onscreen directions. But you probably need to call your ISP; one of my friends bought a new router and it wouldn't work until they called them up and told them to add it."

Okay, that sounds hinky, but whatever, I don't know.

And I got my milk and a few other things (very few, it seems wal-mart more and more is going to only selling the most-processed of processed food, much of which I cannot eat because of the sodium content or other additives) and ran home.

The router was $60. I am not happy about that but I need easily-accessible home internet.





At this point, it was nearly 2:30 but I thought, "Fifteen minutes and I'll have this set up, and I can go back to campus."

Yeah, RIGHT.

It took a *little* doing but I got it to talk to my computer.

Couldn't figure out how to reset the network name: my ONE consolation in all of this was assigning a new and goofy name to the home network. My old one - the name of the dead router, at least in my mine, was Unicorn. But I wanted something clever.

No, not "FBI Van #323" or even "Car 54," everyone does stuff like that. And not "Abe LinkSys" (and anyway, it's a NetGear.)

A bit of thought - I saw Bilbo Laggins online and liked it, though one thing I will say about Vyve is it doesn't seem to lag....so I thought "Bilbo Logins" and then a better one popped into my mind:

Logins and Messy-na. Because I am a child of the 70s and also my house is usually a mess. (get it?)

Anyway, I called Vyve. The helpful woman at the "all other questions" line said "Oh, no, ha ha, no you don't need to tell us about a router" and I laughed and said "I thought not but the guy was really insistent" and I explained I was trying to set the whole thing up and was a little shaky on it.

"Oh," she said, "I can transfer you over to a tech if you'd like"

Yes, I would like. So I talked to José, who was very helpful, and after a few moments I said "Oh, hey....I have full bars, I'm connected to the internet!"

So anyway. At 3 pm-ish where we were: computer was talking to the router, I could get online.

But the printer. First, I hoped somehow it automagically connected, but no such luck. So I tried, with José's help, to connect to the printer....we tried quite hard and he was VERY patient (my stupid Canon is stupid slow to do ANYTHING). I know the funky password for my router by heart because I must have typed it in (using a stupid keypad-like setup on the printer) eighteen times. Nothing we tried worked. I felt bad using so much of José's time so finally I signed off and said I'd try to find out using the Canon website.

I tried. I tried really hard through the Canon website. Found a wizard that might have helped, but it stalled out at the very end, and said it didn't recognize the printer. I could get just so far, and then everything acted like the printer was not turned on, and I KNEW it was on. (The lights were on. But nobody was home, I guess).

It kept asking me to depress the WPS button - implying it was on the router. My router has two buttons: "power" and "reset." Neither of those seemed like a "WPS" button.

I tried EVERYTHING. I was on the point of going out and buying a freaking USB cable and just tethering the printer to my computer every time I wanted to print (which means I'd have to return to my office to print; the printer is huge and it lives on a file cabinet in my home office).

At a friend's suggestion, I called Canon. I didn't hold out a LOT of hope, because in my experience those big-corporation helplines are seriously useless. But my choice at that point was to: figure I had a nice, large, expensive Canon-shaped brick, buy a darned USB cable and live with the inconvenience, shanghai someone who could fix it (I don't know anyone off-hand; I don't think Mike is super computer competent and none of my colleagues are, and certainly no one else I know at church is), or call Canon.

First of all, it didn't look promising. Punched my way through a phone tree only to be told the equivalent of "Thank you Mario! But the princess is in another castle!" ("Our help number is 1-800-for-Canon")

I called, with one apprehensive eye on the clock: I think they're in the Eastern timezone, and that means soon I'd get a "We're sorry, but we're closed for the day, please call back tomorrow" and I don't have TIME tomorrow, it's a long teaching day.

But, I got lucky - I got Dave. (And yes, his name was almost certainly actually Dave; he sounded as Midwestern as I do). I explained the problem. He walked me through a few things, agreed that it seemed stupid there was no WPS button on the new router. We tried a BUNCH of stuff and again I felt bad taking up his time but then again, I guess that's his job.

Finally, he said, "Well, if you're willing to try it, you can uninstall and reinstall the printer, that might fix the problem of the computer acting like the printer is off." We did that. He had me re-run the wizard. It hung up but asked if I wanted to try to 'redetect'

"Oh, good, good," said Dave. "All you have to do now is turn the printer off, then turn the router off, then turn the router back on and then the printer. That should do it"

He stayed on the line (again, I felt bad about it, but at least I was being more polite to him than some of his callers? So maybe spending an extra 10 minutes helping me was better than moving on to the next person who might be a jerk to him?).

I turned the printer off (no great loss there). Turned the router off. Waited a moment. And you better BELIEVE I held my breath upon turning it back on, praying the little lights would all light back up, because at this point my trust in technology was sorely shaken.

They came on.

I turned the printer on.

The wizard finished wizarding.

"Okay, now try printing something," Dave said.

I opened my last week's Sunday school lesson (the first thing to hand) and tried.

It printed. Success. I thanked Dave for all his help and patience, and signed off, but yeah....it took from about 2:30 until *just before five p.m.* to do that. So, not going back to school to work on stuff this afternoon.

Oh, and incidentally, in the chain of waiting to be connected or for stuff to happen? I figured out how to rename my home network "Logins and Messy-Na" so at least there's THAT.


I'd feel really proud of myself for powering through and getting everything set up (with help), but I'm just sort of tired and bummed-out now so it's hard to feel *too* joyful about it...this is often the case with anything that is a hard slog; it's harder for me to be happy over accomplishing something that is hard-won for me than something that comes easily.