Internet Stress
Sep 16th, 2008 by zania
Well, I had Hosting Stress and now I am having Internet Stress. In fact, as I write this post, I am not online at all, just using a blog poster and saving it until we are online again… whenever that will be…
As anyone who has been reading Fraying Edges Depression Help for a while knows. We live in rural Spain. However, we are not Spanish by birth, but English, and still getting used to the ‘intricacies’ of life here after living here for three or so years.
Spanish is not our first language (in fact, in school it was not our second either (that was French, as far as basic GCSE level French went…), so when things go wrong here, it can get just a little stressful trying to sort them out.
Added to that, we do not have a local family connection to call on to help, as is the custom with people who have lived here since birth.
The only Internet connection available to us here is ‘rural ADSL’. Until recently, it was just above dial-up speed, but a few weeks ago, we got the ‘big boost’ (with a very big advertising campaign to go with it) and now we can actually get download speeds of 250k or over. Doesn’t sound much I know to those on fast connections, but to us, both working online, it was like paradise itself. That is until the phone lines went down…
Phone lines and internet connections here go down quite a lot, but they are usually put right within a couple of hours or so… but not this time. The usual stressful mobile phone call to Telefonica (translating rapid-fire Spanish is no joke) produced a mended telephone connection the next day… but no Internet. So we phoned again, only to be told that all was fine their end… so it must be something local which required an engineer…
The Internet here is not considered a major thing. The locals use it, but no one apart from us uses it for work, so everyone is just happy that the telephone lines have been reconnected and think it’s just a ’strange English thing’ that we would need the Internet so much.
As I sit typing this, I am waiting for the engineer to call. We have been told 48 hours at the most, but experience has shown us that 48 hours in Spain can be stretched a little further than that… And when he calls he will talk in Spanish (after all, it is his language) and tell us how to go about fixing ‘el problema’. This will involve more rapid fire Spanish, our very slow and halting Spanish and lots of sign language and eventually, fingers tightly crossed, ‘el problema’ may just be fixed…
In the meantime, I have websites to make, link building to do, sponsor links to update, and a million other things which cannot be done without an Internet connection. In fact, I have a list a mile long of things which had to be done ‘yesterday’.
So I am feeling just a little stressed right now!
Stress-filled post over. Let’s hope that normal service will be resumed…eventually…
