And Then The Hard End....

Too many smartly worded techy post resulted in a techy type disaster this morning.

A little background. The past couple of days, spookily since a Windows 10 update, the USB hard drive I have connected to the wireless router cannot be recognized by either of my computers and at time of typing Google hasn’t provided an answer. It’s no real big deal and when I shut everything down last night I pulled the USB connection out of the back of the router. This was a fumbly jobby done ‘blind’ as all the strings from the modem are bound together and run down behind bookshelves through conduit to connections hidden below the lower shelf with the mains plugged into those remote socket switches that me and my back are so fond of and which I heartily recommend to anyone who likes to switch stuff off at sockets. Especially if said sockets are located behind the TV, the sofa, bookshelves or cabinets.

You bored yet? Move on then as it don’t get much better. 

Of a morning, I prepare downstairs, hit the remote socket switch to wake the kit up, make coffee, head to the desk and read the news. Whoa!! This morning, no lights on the wireless router! Could unplugging a USB lead kill a router? I fumble it back in. Answer; apparently not as it remained dead.

After an hour plus on hands and old knees, unplugging and plugging stuff out and in different sockets to narrow down the problem it started to look like the modem was dead in the water. Why? Think man. Cancel that, way too hard.

My last effort was to pull every string out the back of the router and shove ‘em back in. It was during this operation that my finger inadvertently came into contact with  what felt suspiciously like a button about the size of a pinhead right next to the USB port. With nothing to lose, I pressed it. Yup, you guessed it, it was the wireless router on/off button. I’d obviously and obliviously made contact with it last night and set him to ‘off’ and was blissfully unaware of this simple fact as the router was already off at the mains at that time. How sad is that then?

How many times have I said this? Why, oh why, when presented with a problem, do I, we? insist on approaching the problem from the hardest, most complex, time consuming end and slowly work back to the easy, obvious solution which solves most problems ninety-nine percent of the time?

If nothing else, this little adventure confirmed to me, although confirmation wasn’t really necessary, that there are times when I truly am dumber un a sack o’ hammers.

At least that little button, and the discovery thereof, made heading to the store for a new router unnecessary. A new one that the packaging and the sales ‘expert’ would assure me was simply a matter of plug in an’ go. A phrase which roughly translates to plug in an’ spend every waking hour between now and mid January getting it to work. With luck.

Anyhoo, throw another log, or if you’re an aging hippy, another string of wooden beads on the fire and let’s all celebrate, without any sacrifice, the Winter Solstice with one of Tull’s finest. Again.

               

Quote;  Terry Pratchett.

“The monk solved his immediate problem by giving a little whimper and fainting.”