I used to be more into astrology. I have always liked the way the planets move as symbols through that picture, and can be woven as a story. Much as any intuitive style non-science, it’s easy to make fun of astrology as vague, useless, completely based on rubbish, but I think that it’s pretty cosmic… that humans want to feel like their own small dramas are related to the grander picture of the cosmos, and so feel more connected to something larger than themselves.
“It must be a full moon,” is something you’ll hear when people are acting crazy. When technology rebels, “I bet Mercury is retrograde.”
The tiny planet Mercury is a symbol of communication, speed, and travel, as befits the mythological god who zips across the skies in order to messenger for the Olympian gods. Retrograde is the state of a planet’s apparent backward motion (from the perspective of earth) — like when the train you’re on drifts forward slightly, but the train next to you is still, so it looks like that other train is backing up (this is weirder when you’re stopped at a light, and the truck next to you moves, and YOU feel like, visually, at least, you are going backward, and you panic because OH SHIT you do not wanna crash the car behind you, that would be so stupid, and you thought you had your foot on the brake, and .. oh, you do. Whew.) This is much more palpable when the thing you are looking at takes up your whole visual field, robbing you of other stationary objects that ground your senses and remind you of what motion is real.
Anyway, Mercury retrograde gets blamed for all kinds of tardiness, mishaps, communication errors, and tech fails. And today I’m going to add to the pile.
I got home Monday afternoon and tried to use the internet, but there was no connection supported. It was that horribly annoying message “Wifi secure, no internet connection.” You’re like why the hell do I want to be on the home network if it doesn’t connect to the wider world? I have nothing to say to my printer or other devices that I can’t just walk in there and tell them myself.
The previous day, I had gone to my tutor assignments, and not one but both students were no-shows (…I had never had a no show before in this tutor life).
Over the weekend, as mentioned, I brilliantly left my laptop charging cable at school under the teacher’s desk (not actually the first time I had left a cable under that desk, but before it was miniP and so Not Really A Problem). I ended up using miniP for all my weekend computer needs, which means I basically didn’t use computers much, because miniP is excruciatingly slow. This one was a failure of my own attention.
Friday afternoon I had an online lesson go completely toiletward because of messed up connections. At the time, I was convinced it was the server, but now I know better. (I was also nervous because although I knew I had enough battery for this lesson, I was also using up a very limited resource at that point.)
Now, my phone is really, really going. Like, it’s been a brick for a while, but I tend to not worry about that until it becomes such a hassle (like it actually won’t do the functions that matter to me) that I am forced to deal with it. The time has come. The battery can’t last the day. This, like the internet box (it turns out), has been fading for some time, but it seemed to intensify at an alarming rate just in the last four days or so.
As of today, the internet box is replaced. Apparently, the other one was just old. They sent us a fresh version (of exactly the same item) and I plugged in all the wires last night, and viola, welcome back to the world.
While I was on the phone with “Help help my internet is out plz fix” (for an hour), the lady asked more than once if I had been noticing any issues with the internet lately, with speed, or connectivity, and I stubbornly insisted that I had not. But, actually, I have. I’ve had connectivity drop, but then reconnect fairly quickly. And once you reconnect, you can forget about and ignore the momentary lapse. It was nothing, because it’s gone now.
I still need to deal with the phone. I have… have to call today, to see if I can switch my service to the nicer one I have inherited, or if I will have to buy a new one.
Mercury retrograde is getting the blame for all these things. I was sure it was the ’cause’ and, lo and behold, retrograde is currently happening.
But, I would also like to point out that while all this tech breakdown is annoying, it does make me fix all the things I would never otherwise fix. So, there’s that.
Rerouting.... 