Technical Difficulties 13

Last week, the first week of summer vacation, I was sick. Well, I caught this cold (or whatever it is) the weekend of Memorial Day, and it's been lingering on ever since. I probably would have gotten better sooner if I had taken some time off work. But the last two weeks of school? Yeah, no. I pushed through.

What does that have to do with a Thursday 13? Consider it background for what's been going on.

1. Landlady decided she wanted to switch out the Wi-Fi. She was looking for a cheaper option. And we haven't had a moment of peace since. (We left Frontier Fios and went to Spectrum.)

2. The install went okay. (I got to do it.) But after, getting devices (like my computer) to connect to the Wi-Fi is hit or miss. Mainly miss. Basically, most days after logging onto my computer, I have to unplug the router and let it come back. Then I can connect to the internet.

3. Although, sometimes I have to do this twice...

4. I live in a condo complex. We have a mail room. I went to retrieve the mail one day to find a note on the box. Broken. Must get mail from post office. Deep sigh.

5. Roommate when to post office to get mail. They told her it would be a week until they could get someone out to fix it.

6. A couple days later, I managed to run into the postal carrier. She was very nice, and she explained that it was actually going to take two weeks as when they condensed our area to be part of the greater Los Angeles area, they no longer had the staff nearby to do the job (and likely fewer of them anyway). What was wrong with our mailbox? The key the mail carrier uses to open it to feed in all of our mail got broken off in the lock. (No one is sure who did this.)

7. It did, in fact, take about two weeks. In that time, I went down to the post office twice to retrieve mail (as I didn't want it stacking up). 

8. Landlady switched out our router three (or four?) times to try to fix the connection issue. She also had a couple technicians come out to fix things. (This included getting the streaming TV to work, too.) It turned out that the person who signed her up signed her up for more than she really needed. So, certain things were taken out of the package. This shouldn't have influenced the Wi-Fi, though.

9. Although, the Wi-Fi seems to be strictly a computer issue. The TVs work. My phone works. But getting the computers connecting... Although, landlady has had issues getting her phone to connect to the Wi-Fi.

10. And the Alexa Echo device. Landlady likes to play music. Her Alexa wouldn't connect to the internet, even though it worked just fine before. We tried uninstalling and reinstalling. We tried factory reset. She went to visit family out of state, and somehow her grandson got it working, although that didn't translate to the home Wi-Fi. 

11. She finally got it working after finding that her phone still had it set to the grandson's home. But why didn't it work before? That's still a mystery. (Especially as there are two other Alexa devices on the Wi-Fi that continued to work just fine.) 

12. I went to turn on my TV, and it wouldn't turn on. Just... nothing... I unplugged and replugged it in. Then, in desperation, I pulled out my old remote. (I bought a new rechargeable remote a couple years back.) It turned the TV on. I had to reinstall the "new" remote, and it apparently had 5% of charge remaining (which was very weird as I had just recharged it not a week ago). Deep sigh.

13. So, with all the internet issues, landlady has decided Spectrum isn't worth it. Now it's just a matter of switching the internet again... *ducks head*