It started with a flat tire

20160415_150323Have you ever experienced a weekend that felt like one very long Monday? This one started with a flat tire, resulting from brief inattention, resulting in tire-meet-curb (and curb won).

Then I sang “I am Woman!” while I dealt with it.*

I left work early (but later than intended), to get home, pack, and hit the road as soon as possible (after the kids arrived from school) going to Port Aransas for business/vacation. Tire change meant delayed departure.

BUSINESS: Take Golf Cart II to our short-term-rental beach house. Golf Cart I, a lemon, relentlessly backfired. Multiple trips to the shop didn’t give confidence that this would be anything but trouble, so…we traded up.

20160415_073648Meet “Greased Lightening”!

In addition, our newly upgraded Smart Home Hub drops offline ~daily. Called tech support, was told we needed to be at-the-hub to work-on-the-hub, to take the first step: “reboot the hub”.

VACATION: If we don’t spend at least an hour on the beach, our resident grandchildren have been robbed! So we spent an hour on the beach. And, we went to/from the beach in the aforementioned golf cart, which was totally rockin’. We also ate out a lot, and went to the park, so there was plenty to offset the business.

REALITY: We arrived well past the kiddos’ bedtime Friday night. After our best rush-job to get through PJ’s/teeth-brush/bedtime story/prayers/nursery songs, which are all things better left unrushed, we finally got the kids to bed. Soon after (but not soon enough), we went to bed.

Saturday morning, I was up and at ’em by 6:30am. The kids were waiting for me. Lovely. Can’t blast them out of bed with dynamite all week long, but give them sleep deprivation and vacation, and they are MACHINES!

My day, after an injection of coffee and breakfast, began with a call to tech support for the Smart Home Hub. This support tech was way smarter than the last support tech, as evidenced by her first statement of “let me reboot your hub.” Wait! What? You mean, I didn’t have to drive 4 hours to get to the hub in order for said hub to be rebooted? Grrr.

Later, in the early afternoon, we lost our cable connection. Intermittent disconnects interrupted Netflix, ending with a final fatal no-more-worky-end-of-movie.

Great. Call TWC and walk through trouble-shooting. Net result (no pun intended)? Need to replace the modem. And maybe the splitter (although failure persisted without the splitter in the mix, we won’t let logic slow us down). So, Mr. H. hauls @$$ to Corpus Christ’s TWC location to swap the modem (for one that lacks landline support, which means “to be continued” in the language of tech support). AAAANNNNNDDDD….new modem doesn’t work, either. Better yet, when I connected it up, the direct cable in the master bedroom went out. Wha-?

We have paying guests coming Thursday. We have no cable. Without cable, the Smart Home Hub doesn’t work. Wait… You know, perhaps all of the hub’s drops are not the fault of the hub. Darn you, TWC!!! And, the tech that did the activation of the new hub (that didn’t result in fixing the issue) implied the issue is probably TWC’s, but … 2-3 customers without cable do not a “cable outage” make.

On top of all of this, 5YO is running a low grade fever and not eating because her tummy hurts. Trip to pharmacy for thermometer, Tylenol, pepto.

Sunday morning, up and at ’em … and once again, children await the wakening. Can’t catch a break. But, at least Sunday was un-tech-eventful.

*CONFESSION: I flagged down young muscle to wrestle the bad tire into the trunk, at the end of the tire-changing ordeal. No way was I going to mess with that heavy, dirty, beastly thing. I still get street cred for the tire change.

About Fran Hart

Disciple of Christ, earning a living as the director of US-based operations for a Taiwanese company, managing an engineering organization while carving out time to write. Wife, Mother, Grandmother.
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