Back to the Land

Every year I spend a few days on a family member’s farm in Saskatchewan; this is usually followed by many photos of cows and Prairie landscapes here on ongoing. The Internet there is dial-up but usable, with the application of some discipline. Only this year, I fired up my recently-repaired Mac and it told me that my internal modem did not exist. Repeated reboots failed to make any progress, and I couldn’t really get to the Apple knowledge base. That’s OK, all I really need is email and I could use the secure-webmail interface for that. Only for some reason, that wasn’t working; incomprehensible error messages about something being misconfigured. Ouch; so I filed a trouble ticket and called my boss’ admin and asked her to drop me a voicemail if anything super-important went across our group alias. Then when I called back to check my messages, my personalized Sun 1-877 number gave me a busy signal. Clearly, some heavenly power did not want me interacting with work. So I closed the computer with an emphatic “snap” and went to take a crap, and the toilet backed up.