Ever since moving to my apartment here in Wheeling I’ve had intermittent internet service at best and a downright lousy connection at worst. It doesn’t flitter like a wonky fluorescent tube as much as completely disappear in one solid chunk for most of the day. I wouldn’t care to hazard a guess as to how often it happens, but last weekend it went awol.

It went down most of Friday evening, all of Saturday, and an appreciable chunk of Sunday. Steph rang Comcast to get somebody to take a look and they promised to send a cable guy on Monday. In the meantime I had to put up with internet service on a par with half of India and most of the Middle East. Although it’s news to me that the Ohio river stretches all the way to Sri Lanka and off to Iran.

And whilst we’re on the subject of long stretches and Sri Lanka – our resident Scottish barrel of giggles at Butler Sheetmetal, Jasper, is currently there for his daughter’s wedding. I presume he’s back as the furthest and longest he’s ever gone for a holiday is a wild weekend in Blackpool. Oh to think of the pasty-faced mumbly grumbler sweating his little lardy backside off in one of the most humid places known to man. Any normal mortal working at Butler Sheetmetal is quite accustomed to the place being dark, dank and below zero during your average heatwave, but Jasper has a genetic predisposition to such conditions and scurries about aimlessly when exposed to sunlight.

You know, a bit like a confused woodlouse when you lift up a mouldy brick.

But I think his vacation has been adequately covered by the new lad – Cain. Apparently, to all extents and purposes, the last guy we had was a bit too ‘aerospace’ and had to return to cleaner pastures – make of that what you will, people. Now you may glibly enquire whether Cain is a relative . He’s not, but he is the son of John’s next door neighbour, which could be anybody in Trawden. But, you’ve got to ask the question seeming people round our end get called Dingles after the workshy, ne’er-do well inbreds on Emmerdale Farm (sorry, Emmerdale), whether employing a lad called Cain isn’t playing up to our national stereotype?

Thank God they didn’t call him Shadrach.

the Dingles of Emmerdale Farm
Cain’s in the chair (on the left)

Anyway, getting back to the internet outage – according to our 476th cable guy, there’d been Dingle-esque shenanigans going on in that somebody added an extra splitter and was siphoning off our internet. And if it wasn’t our downstairs neighbours being shifty then one of the previous cable guys had been tremendously dumb.

ALLEGEDLY!