There is a light switch in my new apartment which logically should have turned on the hall light but which instead shut off all the electricity in the living room. I've flipped it accidentally several times (it is now taped down). When flipped back on, the electricity returned, my computer came back on -- but my modem could not connect with the Internet. The first couple of times I called Cox, and they were able to reboot my modem from their end, but Saturday it remained resolutely inert. The person at Cox said maybe it was "fried". From flipping a light switch?
Anyway, I had to take off part of Wednesday to wait for the Cox repairman to come. He examined the modem, replaced some wires/cables he said had been spliced in badly, and, Lo! The Internet!!
He left -- and two hours later the first of a series of thunderstorms marched through the Tulsa area and knocked out the power. Only for a few minutes, but afterwards -- you guessed it, no Internet.
"Now, come on!" I told myself. "There was a time you had no Internet. There was a time you had no CD player, DVD player. You were about the last person to buy a PC or cell phone. So why the panic over a temporary Internet outage?" True, but these days I pay most bills via the Internet (and billing time was almost here); I can't send out stories to magazines without it, and I tossed my last phone book long ago so I can't look up many important phone numbers without traveling elsewhere. So I called for a repairman again; he'd be there Friday.
MEANWHILE -- My monthly rent is on automatic payment. So is water and sewer and Cox itself. I could have sworn the Public Service Company of Oklahoma was, too, until I idly opened an envelope from PSO late Wednesday night and found a Final Notice and a date for cutting off my electricity. The date: a week earlier.
MEANWHILE MEANWHILE -- the storms marched through Tulsa. Because of them my power went off twice a day anyway, judging by the number of times I had to re-set my clocks.
Thursday I fretted all day about PSO. At lunch I spent half an hour on the phone trying to talk to someone. Eventually someone answered. I explained my non-auto-payment mixup, and I was assured PSO wouldn't actually cut off the power until August 9. I hung up in relief --
But it was too late. You see, the air conditioning where I work is always cranked up to subarctic conditions, especially so during the recent heatwave. Thursday it was only about 80 degrees F. outside, but the A/C roared on as cryogenically as ever. It was insanely cold. Being on edge the previous few days didn't help. I guess I lowered my bodily defenses, and by the time I went to bed that night I had the first raging head-cold I've had in years.
On the way home Thursday however, I stopped at the library to use their Internet and try to pay PSO's bills/late fees/reinstallment fee/whatever. But I couldn't create an account unless I got their activation code from an email -- and I didn't know my passwords for AOL or OUTLOOK.COM (come on! I signed on once 15 to 20 years ago, and they've stayed on since! I forgot 'em!) Replace the passwords? Sure -- but you had to answer an email each company sent to the other email address . . .
Friday I stuck a check to PSO in the mailbox on the way to work; it would get there long before August 9. I felt so ill at work I went home early. I tried to call PSO to tell them the check was on its way, but a recording flat-out told you not to call for the present because all operators were tied up answering lines down and power out calls.
Yes, the storms were still around. I got home about 3:00 PM, and the power was out. The Cox repairman called and said he was amazingly ahead on his calls and could come at once. I said the electricity was out; well, he couldn't do much without that. He told me to call him if the power came back on.
So I sat there on my little bed, head pounding, snot dribbling, in my dark little apartment, and a horrible little thought came to me: What if, despite all the assurances of the PSO operator, I had only reminded them of my tardy payments? And they had finally gotten around to cutting me off?
I stumbled outside. Other apartments had lights on.
"It's Friday, 3:30. I have a 90 minute window before the libraries close," I muttered.
This time I took credit cards, bill stubs, the file of papers I signed when I first rented my apartment, my thick three-ring binder full of IDs and Passwords, everything. I got online about 3:50, created a PSO account, gave PSO $180 in fees, late or otherwise (there's another $180 check headed their way in the mail even now, I hope that holds them for a while), and got home about 4:45. I'll give 'em this, my power was already back on. The Cox guy came, found out my modem was way too powerful for the apartment's wiring capacity (didn't follow it all -- he said something about needing a "four-way splitter"), and finally I was back in business.
I flopped into bed for thirteen hours. I still have some hacking and coughing, but I feel like I've hit the bottom of some sort of abyss and am now bouncing up.
It's hard to explain, but most of the events of the past several years seem to fit a pattern -- learning experiences of a sort. Problems and catastrophes, yes, but ones that settled themselves in an orderly fashion, and would have been utterly devastating had they occurred in any other order. I'm not quite sure what I was supposed to learn from this week's events, though.
Oh, well -- writers are supposed to produce material for blogs, websites, FaceBook, Patreon, Twitter and more if they want to keep in the public eye, and my flow has atrophied over the past year. Maybe now I can start churning out interesting essays and anecdotes again -- starting with this one.
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