Different Drum: Satellite dish down for count over the holiday
I would never describe myself as a lucky person. Although my grandparents’ legal last name was “Donovan,” the luck of the Irish doesn’t run deep for me, but downhill. There’s been no stopping that from happening. Every Irish blessing I receive comes with a complementary curse. No good luck or deed goes unpunished.
I appear capable of getting into an equal amount of trouble whether minding my own business or stirring the pot. And I’m typically in too far over my head curse-wise to be able to free up a hand to stir anything. That doesn’t stop trouble from troubling me.
An example of this happened during the late night and early morning hours of Friday, December 16. On that occasion, I was minding my own business, sleeping soundly in my bed, when someone blew through the stop sign at the T-intersection in front of my house, careened off into my yard and took out our Internet satellite dish with their vehicle.
Of all the things a wayward driver might hit at our intersection, the possibility of him/her flattening our Internet satellite dish was not top of mind. It was as if the person had to work at it, as the dish is in a fairly out-of-the-way place. Yet hit it, they did!
I wish I could report that all my children and I commented about this destructive pre-holiday destructive development was, “Oh, dear” (or in the alternative, “Oh, my”), but our language was a wee bit more colorful than that.
No doubt, if we were more mature, understanding, compassionate and grace-filled, we would have been primarily and more deeply concerned over whether the driver got hurt. Secondarily, we would have focused on the gratitude angle, and considered ourselves fortunate said driver hadn’t also flattened our television satellite, which stood approximately 10 feet away.
However, in our petty selfishness, all we could muster was concern over how this minor disaster might affect us each: I wouldn’t be able to obtain church music playlists, to email newspaper columns to various publications or to check online Christmas gift orders; my daughter couldn’t use social media or communicate with anyone who didn’t have an iPhone; and my son wouldn’t be able to do group gaming. Worse, without the working presence of Internet satellite, our already sketchy cell phone signals would flat-line.
We didn’t realize how much we had taken for granted the Internet dish’s quiet daily execution of duties until it lay useless on the frozen tundra. On that weekend the equipment ended up in a yard heap, I struggled with trying to find who to contact to have it repaired. The satellite dish and programming had originally come bundled with our satellite television dish and programing, but had afterward parted ways when we’d switched television satellite dish companies.
So each time I called our Internet provider, the system recognized my phone number and played a recording stating that if this were a service issue, I must contact the original Internet satellite dish installer. That forced me to wait until Monday to use a neutral phone number at my workplace to crash through the branches of their danged phone tree.
The timing of this issue was the worst we could have encountered, with the allegedly most menacing winter storm in decades approaching and Christmas and New Year’s Eve business shut-downs in the same timeframe. So I felt fortunate Dec. 22 to secure a service appointment for Dec. 27 — until the technician failed to show up. Then I was out of commission as of Dec. 29 due to severe illness.
While I was in the hospital, my daughter contacted the Internet satellite dish company. Mad as a leprechaun, with a full head of steam to match, she took the initiative to change our Irish luck and held the repair people to the terms of our service agreement. In a handful of days, a technician arrived to put up a new pole, mount a new Internet satellite dish on it and to synchronize its signals with our modem.
The road from which our Internet accessibility was severed rose to meet us. With a little digital luck, our lives were rosy again. Until next time.
— Kristy Smith’s Different Drum humor columns are archived at her blog: diffdrum.wordpress.com.
This article originally appeared on Sturgis Journal: Different Drum: Satellite dish down for count over the holiday
