It was horrible, I never thought it could happen to me, but my internet disappeared for the best part of yesterday.
It was then I realised what a life-line, or more accurately a sanity line, this connection with the outside world is. I felt lost, cut off – stuck.
Rick has had problems with the office connection down in Briancon, but for some reason Monetier has escaped the vagueries of an intermitent internet supply, so yesterday’s outage came as quite a shock.
It’s not as if I can go to an internet cafe, as pretty much everything is shut in that department, but that’s the price for living in Serre Chevalier year round.
The phone also runs through the same box, so that all packed up as well. I was getting a bit nervous, but it’s not as if it was ringing off the hook.
You just don’t know how lucky you are having this service until it’s gone. The fact that this being France, should I have needed to have someone come and do something that could take up to a month – easily, it took six – count ‘em 6, months to get an internet into this building in the first place, so you can understand my sense of loss and panic.
As it is it came back on after some hours and so did the phone once I rebooted the box and unplugged and replugged everything a couple of times it was all right.
What a dull story. If you’d like to enter the dullest Serrechevalier.org story ever please write in. We’ve set the bar pretty low though – man’s internet stops working then starts working again – but please rise to the challenge.
In case of internet failure please post your entry to:
PO Box 16, Briancon 05340, France.
Sorry we can’t return any of the entries, but there is a prize for all those shown.
Tags: rise to the challenge, Serre Chevalier, internet supply, dull story, BrianconNo related posts.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
I have always been a bot leery of wi-fi for the internet, so I keep mine all plugged in.
This is why:
http://www.mastsanity.org/wi-fi.html
@Fergus Rainbow: mmm – but the levels we are talking about are so low. At the end of the day EMR hits your tissue, agitates the molecules and the tissue heats up, which could in turn cause damage, – that’s it – no mystery Dr Who Alien radiation, just kinetic energy turning to heat.
The EMR from light and UV (eg the sun) is way more dangerous. There is a lot of that here in Serre Chevalier.
Wifi levels are tiny compared to mobile phones and microwave ovens. This backs me up: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6676129.stm
For a bloke who relies on the internet to ridiculous amount, I live in a ridiculous place. My area of Briancon (down by Aldi) has the worst connection in Serre Chevalier. It was however, the first place around here to get broadband so it is probably first on the list to get upgraded to a 20Mb connection. Meanwhile it is 1Mb! and Orange.fr charge about 30 yozz/month for that. On telly – I’ve seen the UK sky package where they chuck in a 20Mb connection for £10/month – nice, but skiing there is rubbish.
It’s not the heating, but the radio radiation damage to your cells, which is why the industry likes to use the heating measure – because the heating doesn’t damage you.
Watch that Panorama doco I linked to, it really isn’t too hard to believe something akin to a microwave causes damage, otherwise why shield the oven?
@Fergus Rainbow: and Radio radiation is? Probably not the place to argue physics…so I thought I’d share a dull story, courtesy of Steve Coogan (below)