by Pa Rock
Man of the Times
Living in the country is a normally a quiet and peaceful existence that promotes good health outcomes through things like better sleep and less day-to-day stress. But country living also has its downsides. Getting to a medical specialist, a large entertainment venue, or a major transportation hub can require several hours on the road, and finding certain products often involves placing orders with a remote provider and waiting for them to be delivered.
One particular problem that I encountered ten years ago when I moved from the fourth-largest metropolitan area in the US to a home outside of a small rural town in the Missouri Ozarks was public services. The house that I chose to buy and inhabit was located about a mile beyond the city limits. The city, a community of 12,000, had extended its electric service to the area where I lived, but not water, which meant that I got my water through from a well and disposed of sewage through a septic tank system. Wifi was available through several providers, none of whom were local or reasonably priced - and the quality of service was sporadic depending on exactly where your dwelling was located.
Eventually I managed to get the house connected to a rural water company and retire the well, but the septic system and poor wifi remained - and with the advent of television through "streaming" services and "smart speakers" for music and news, wifi became more and more important - and as our home's dependency on wifi increased its dependability decreased. A month ago it was to the point that when I would boot-up the computer, the television would pause, and it was almost impossible to get through any program without several pauses of varying lengths regardless of what else was pulling the wifi. (It sort of reminded me of the telephone "party-line" days of my youth when we had to wait on the neighbors to finish their calls before we could make ours.)
I suspected that I could get a faster internet speed from my provider, but had been reluctant to start that process because every phone call to the "local" provider gets bounced to a call center in a foreign location and I have trouble understanding and making myself understood, so I had just let the bad service go unchecked for way too long.
Last week my son had a friend over from work, a young man who seemed to know quite a bit about technology. So since we had an available expert to answer our questions, we asked a few. His ultimate diagnosis was that our internet was very slow - on a par with the old dial-up modems of a couple of. decades ago.
Duly shamed, I decided it was time to take action.
That very day I phoned the "local" internet provider, and instead of being bounced to Pakistan or Bangladesh, this time I wound up speaking to a very nice young lady in Central America, or perhaps Ecuador, and after a brief discussion in which she sold me a better service, and a lengthier discussion in which she tried to convince me to rent faster modem that I ultimately bought outright, we were in business. The modem would arrive in two days and I would be responsible for installing it and the new speed would increase on Monday.
Sunday evening the old wifi service was shut down without warning, and the new modem did not arrive until the next afternoon, so that was inconvenient as hell. On Monday morning I took my laptop to town and wrote and published the daily blog in the McDonald's parking lot, and then came home and spent the remainder of the morning working on Word documents that did not require a wifi connection. That evening my son's friend came back over and got the television, computer, and printer hooked up to the new modem and life was grand - until he discovered that "Alexa" and her good friend "Dot" would come on board. Knowing that those two devices were several years old, and I had experienced several problems with "Dot" previously, I suggested that I might replace both with newer models, and my son's friend thought that would be the way to go. (If they didn't work, I could always return them through Amazon's liberal return policy. Thanks, Bezos!)
Time to shop!
I have, for over a decade, had an old radio/alarm clock on the bedside table. I never use that alarm because I wake automatically before dawn every day, but I like to have a clock close by so that when I wake up in the middle of the night I can readily see how much time I have left before I have to get up. The radio quit working years ago. As I shopped for a "Dot" replacement, I saw that they now have a "Spot" which had a clock face. The "Echo" family, including "Alexa," "Dot,"and "Spot," get their time from the Marine Corps Band or some other government agency and reset automatically whenever the power goes out, so I was really interested in this essentially worry-free small "Spot" with a clock face. One item down.
I didn't see the primary "Alexa" that resembled my old one, so I contacted my Kansas City son and asked for his recommendation. He liked the most expensive option - of course he did - thanks, Tim! - a squat and heavy speaker called the "Studio." Two items down. Shopping complete!
The new smart speakers arrived yesterday, and I determined to try and hook them up myself. Both required a fair amount of reshuffling clutter and dusting before I could proceed, but eventually I had a clean space in the bedroom for "Spot" and a bigger space in the living room for "Studio." "Spot" required pulling-up the "Alexa" app on my phone (I could handle that), plugging the device in (managed that one, too), and then scanning the bar code thingy that appeared on "Spot's" screen. That took a call to Tim, but then I managed to do that one also. After that I checked a couple of boxes on the app while "Spot" made its own adjustments, and a couple of minutes later it was lit up and playing "Whiskey River" by Willie!
The hardest part about setting-up the much larger "Studio" was just finding a place to put it. After that I plugged it in and moments later Hank Senior was rocking the house with "Jambalaya."
(If it is simple enough that I can do it, folks, it is really, really simple!)
And I'm back in business. The television plays without interruptions, and the computer races through a couple of hundred emails a day without those unnecessary and very annoying delays that I had endured for years with the old wifi service. I learned yesterday evening that the "Studio" will even find and boot-up shows on television - as long as they are on Prime.
I'm in techno-heaven, and all for an extra $10 a month (and some new equipment).
I probably should have done it sooner.
