Holy Week was neither religious nor spiritual at least for me but was more academic. I, however, offered the fruits of my labor to the Lord. Read on and you’ll know why.
There are two ways of accessing the Internet: one is through dial-up access and another is through dedicated access. With dial-up you can choose when to access the Internet and it’s relatively cheaper than dedicated access, but with dedicated access you’re always connected to the Internet.
On the second week of my chicken pox infection, I begged my husband to get me an Internet prepaid card so I can access my e-mail accounts. When he refused telling me to just wait until I get back to work, I pleaded and told him I was so bored to death already and that I badly needed to check my Inboxes, after which he gave in and purchased one for me.
What he got me for 100 pesos was good for 20 hours plus an additional 6 hours up to the end of March. Not familiar with Internet prepaid, I thought it was a good enough deal, or was it?
Anyway, my previous experience with dial-up access a few years ago didn’t prepare me for what I was about to undergo.
I have dedicated access to the Internet at work so I’m used to just clicking on my browser and I’m connected to the Internet already. But since I had to make a connection with the ISP first, I made sure my patience meter was in check.
The first problem I had was connecting with the provider. I just couldn’t make a connection the first time I dialed. Reason: phone line was busy. After about ten time of redialing, I finally got connected. You should see the look on my face when I got connected, it just lit up. Success at last! But my Internet Explorer was creating havoc because it kept on displaying different error messages informing me that it found error in the registry and in IE that I had to update and instructing me to log on to the specified website for updates. The worst was when it kept on shutting down the system for some error in the LASS.exe files. And this kept on every ten minutes or so that I was connected to the Internet.
At the brink of losing my patience with the automatic shutdown and reconnecting with the ISP, I showed the errors to my husband and he told me to download Firefox and use it instead of IE. Now I know what all those security warnings on IE are about.
I lost no time downloading Firefox but in the middle of the download Windows automatically shutdown again. And it wasn’t easy connecting with the ISP every time Windows would shutdown. My second attempt to download was a success so I proceeded to access my e-mail accounts and forgot about my annoyance with the ISP until I had to connect to the Internet again the next day.
Saturday, the second day of using dial-up came and boy was I disappointed. It was either I couldn’t make a connection with the ISP or if I had a connection, I couldn’t make a connection with the websites. Sunday was no different.
Exasperated, I asked my husband what could be wrong and he told me it could be that our PC was slow and could not process the task fast enough or there were really problems with the network.
After three days of useless attempts to access the Internet, I was getting frustrated because I felt that my access time was wasted with the frequent disconnection from the server and I was getting edgy already because of the impending deadline for the module I’m working on and I still had to do some research.
But I refused to give up. I’ll tell you more next week because I’m still waiting for a very important phone call.
