Oh No

I had to start wearing glasses a few years ago in order to see what was on the computer screen in front of me, and to read with, in fact, if I wanted to see any detail inside an arm's length. Inconvenient, because I didn't need them to see anything outside that range. But I got my pair of lightweight polycarbonate lenses from the opticians and went through the usual games of misplacing them, leaving them at home, losing them on the train, and discovered that cheap reading glasses from chemists worked just as well. Until recently.

I suppose it might have been the change from sitting at a desk all day long to working outside all the time staring at a range of horizons, but my eyes have begun to change back again, and I found that several times during the past week I had sat down in front of the computer, put on the reading glasses, but then found myself unable to focus on the screen. I assumed that I was exceptionally tired, but after a day's rest on Saturday I was still struggling to focus. When I came across my old prescription glasses during the tidy-up, I put them on and found that they worked perfectly; I could read even the tiniest fonts.

I also remembered why I had stopped wearing them and gone over to cheap reading glasses; the right-hand lens was loose in the frames, and taking off the glasses too quickly resulted in the lens dropping out. After catching it for the umpteenth time I got fed up and asked Little Petal where she had put the gel superglue she uses for her jewelry making. (Which I buy on my company account, making note to self for billing purposes).

It was breakfast time, Monday morning, and I wanted to check the emails quickly before heading off to work. I stood in the kitchen by the sink, wearing the reading glasses to see to drip little blobs of superglue onto the top of the lens over the silly nylon strip that the manufactures felt would be sufficient to hold it in place. My arms were shaking a bit, a result of all the hard work they have been doing lately, and I knew that I should really be sitting down, but my characteristic impetuosity got in the way. I finished, looked at the glue line, and noticed one small blob had just curled over the edge of the lens top and was slightly on the face. I tore off a piece of kitchen roll and tried to brush it away. My hand shook and instead the blob smeared over the upper part of the lens.

Oh no.

I moved quickly to try and wipe the lens clean, and realised after one swipe that not only had it made it worse, but I could feel the tackiness on my fingertips that told me the kitchen towel had not absorbed as much of the excess glue as the adverts suggested it would. I was in danger of becoming attached to it.

Oh no.

I dipped my hand into the washing up bowl and swished it around while asking Little Petal if she had any superglue solvent. No, she didn't. She suggested hot soapy water would remove it before it hardened, so I squeezed washing-up liquid onto the lens and swabbed vigorously with the soggy remnants of the kitchen towel. Nothing happened. She took the glasses from me and tried herself, then gave them back to me, saying I had left it too late for the soapy water to have any chance of success.

Oh no.

So I did the obvious thing, I went on-line to search for methods of removing superglue. The browser window came up, I entered my question, and waited. Nothing happened. I moved to the Linux server and tried again. The browser window came up, accepted the question, and then just sat there saying it was waiting for a response. Little Petal, getting ready to go up to Newcastle for a week, announced that her machine was not getting any answer from the AA travel site. Our broadband connection seemed to have dropped back to sub-dialup speeds.

Oh no.

She set off into the great unknown of roadworks and motorway closures for crime scene investigations, and I set off to work.

So that evening, returning to an empty house, I had to catch up with two people's chores before settling down again to see what could be up with the broadband. Wearing my glue-smeared prescription glasses and consequently seeing the screen through only my left eye, the modem details screen came up with awful slowness. I managed to get the basic details screen to fully display, and noted down the username that it logged into the ISP with, because I had no idea where all the connection details paperwork existed now. Blame the recent tidy up in the office for that. As it turned out, it was the one sensible thing I did in this whole sorry story.

I decided that the momentary power cut the day before might have upset the modem, and simply toggling the on-off switch didn't make any difference, so I used a little piece of wire to perform a hard reset. Then I realised the folly of what I had done. Although I knew the modem's admin username and password I had entered into it two or three years ago I had no idea what the factory default equivalents where, and like the connection details, the user manual was elsewhere.

Oh no.

I knew that the default IP address was not the same subnet as my LAN, so I tried to access it from a laptop with a crossover cable direct into the modem, with no luck. I put the modem back onto the LAN, and noticed that although the link LED as active, there was no LAN LED. A couple of years ago the USB connection in the modem had suddenly failed, and so I realised that the network interface had probably also decided it had seen enough of this world.

Oh no.

Over the road in the stores I knew I had a wireless router, and could only hope that it had an ADSL connection. I fetched it back, and found that it did not. All it had was a WAN port. I wired it up anyway, because I needed a DHCP master to let all the other computers in the room talk to each other. Straightaway I hit a problem; I needed to connect to it by a LAN lead, but the new laptop could sense there was a Wifi connection available and insisted on trying to connect. I powered up the old laptop again and coupled the cables up.

I had just got the browser page up to configure the WiFi router, when the mouse pointer slid up to the top of the screen and over to the right. I pulled it back, and managed to enter three characters into the field before the cursor was snatched away again. The old laptop fault had re-asserted itself, and the normal cure was to leave it powered on for an evening until the cursor got tired of sulking in the corner.

Oh no.

Still determined to restore at least local communications, I plugged a graphics tablet into the USB port and for several minutes fought a determined battle of pointing devices, until I had the WiFi router at least allocating DHCP addresses in the range I needed.

I was following the setup instructions on the configuration CD, which included suggesting that the modem should be coupled up to the WiFi router WAN port, which I did, just out of a sense of completeness. Something caught my eye, the LAN LED on the apparently broken modem was now glowing strongly. I typed in the factory default IP address for it, and was rewarded by the browser inviting me to enter the username and password I couldn't remember. However, I had by now recollected that the installation CD for the modem might be in the archive box, and was right. It was there. The trouble was the WiFI installation phase was not complete, but would not allow me to exit. I ejected the CD anyway, and tried to access the documentation on the modem CD. Windows threw up an error message saying there was no CD in the drive and please to re-insert it. I tried canceling the message box, without success. I tried using Taskmaster to close down the program, without success. I tried to shut down the computer so that I could restart, without success. The message box continued to ask me to re-insert the CD. I re-inserted it, but by now the program had decided to no longer continue the installation, and I was left with a message box that just wouldn't close or do anything useful.

Oh no.

Finally I exercised my right to control of my own equipment with the three-fingered salute issued twice in close succession, and was able to power up the new laptop and connect by wireless to the router, and through that to the modem. Now able to read the CD, I could enter the default username and password, and then went to find the piece of paper on which I had earlier written down the connection username. It was hiding.

Oh no.

So near, and yet to be denied. I rampaged through the room, flinging aside heaps of papers and books still awaiting their new home as part of the tidy-up. Almost despairing, I began to pack away the old laptop of the haunted mouse pointer, and found the details underneath it.

Oh yes.

After getting everything back to normal, I was able to piece together retrospectively how it had all gone wrong in the first place. As part of the tidy-up I had disconnected a Freecom Storage Gateway which I had been trying to use unsuccessfully for a few days. This had, unknown to me, taken over the role of DHCP master, and the network of computers carried on quite happily without it until the momentary power cut had reset the modem, which decided that, as it hadn't been acknowledged as the DHCP master for some time, it was dammed if it was going to resume duties now. As it was, even if I had realised this, I wouldn't have been able to persuade it to start doing it again as I was unable to bring up any of the browser pages in the configuration menu due to the general sulkiness.

And, after finally getting back online and re-issuing my request for help with superglue removal, I found that all possibly solvents would also probably damage the polycarbonate lenses of the glasses. So, in the spirit of 'nothing less to loose', I tried polishing the smears away with Solvol Autosol, and after a few minutes of rubbing, achieved an acceptable result. In fact, a perfect result. It even got rid of an annoying little scratch across the lower face of the lens that I never actually saw when looking through it, but was irritated by the knowledge that it was there.

Oh yes.

And so I'm back to bother you all again.

Oh ho.