Techno-Challenge

I'll agree my head has been a bit fuzzy this week; and working to do my regular tasks took a little more dedicated concentration and double-checking just to be sure things were done correctly. Then it happened -- suddenly and without explanation, my laptop computer that is in my jewelry studio decided it was no longer connected to the wireless network in the house. What?

Okay, I'm pretty tech-savvy (well, that might be a slight over-statement) and, under normal circumstances, I can usually welcome and conquer these types of challenges. So I went through the Rolodex of my mind (does anyone even know what a Rolodex is or was?) and walked step by step through what I thought should bring my network back to normal. Shut both computers down and then warned Beatrix, who has to have her nose in everything I am doing, that I was "going in" to check all the cable connections on the back of the desktop and under the desk. I say "going in" because it is such a tangle of cords and cables back there that a person could go in and never be seen again -- computers, printers, scanners, postal meters, headsets and routers all meet in that one single location. Sometimes I think it would have been wise to go into the cable manufacturing biz -- just in this little location I must have 100+ feet of cable and I am small potatoes by comparison. But I digress. Confident that I had rectified the situation, I rebooted first the desktop and then the laptop. Ah, success...on the desktop. However...not so much on the laptop, I was still getting that annoying error message...you know the one with the tone that sounds like it should end with "you idiot." Dejected, after having sent a text off to my brother-in-law, who I call Rainman since he can figure out any of this techno-crap, only to have him respond with a list of the very same things I already did, I decided to call it quits for the night and just bring in the Big Kahuna, aka my computer guy in the morning.


A few hours later, not being able to just "leave it alone" I went back into the studio, sat with my hands in my lap and stared at the laptop. Suddenly, there it was like a billboard lit up in Vegas. Did you know that in the lower right hand corner of this laptop there is a tiny little switch labeled "Wireless" with the On and Off locations pretty clearly marked? Well, poop. I reached over and sheepishly slid the button to the ON position and booted up and viola -- there it was...IE plain and simple. The only thing I can figure is that it got flipped to the off position when I was on a dusting jag earlier that day. The entire experience was like a little microcosm of life -- makes me wonder how much we miss because we are so looking in all the wrong places. Or maybe, our preconceived ideas serve as the catalyst for us to "force" the big picture when, if we toss away our preconceptions and just let the little components of the picture speak to us, the end result would be a picture that not only functions but is beautiful as well.