Luddites

This morning, in the middle of a thunderstorm, my internet service goes out. Well, hell.

Five minutes later, the French guest says she wants to call home, to arrange pickup in Paris. No prob. Umm....how do you make an international call? Well, I guess we ask... ask the phone company? Dial zero on the house phone, get Verizon. Chirpy recorded voice. Am I calling about this phone number? Um..no. Well, then, what number AM I calling about? I'm not. Press Three for Other. I press three. Is this for a FiOS problem? Well, hell, I don't know. Press Three for Other. I press three again. Is this new service? No. Fixing a problem? No. After a couple of minutes of this, I say the hell with this. Normally, I'd just do a web search for info, but theat option is out. Now what? Oh, wait. We still have some paper phone books stacked in the closet. First one just tells me how to make long distance calls.Second one doesn't have any info at all. Third one -- ah, the third one says that I have to dial 011 to get out of the US, then 33 for France, then the local number. Okay, now we're cookin'.

We dial the 01133 and the ten digit French number. This number is not in service. What? We try it again. Still nada. Well, wait. The number she has starts with a 04. And the example in the phone book mentions that the city code for Lyon, where we're calling, is 4. You need all ten digits for dialing INSIDE France, but what if you don't need the two digit prefix when calling internationally? So we try it. Nope. Okay, what about just ditching the zero? Didn't we have to do something like that to make the rented French cell phones work? So we try it.

And it works.

A half hour later, I call the dealer to schedule an appointment for maintenance on a car. Then I call my wife -- because, when you lose web access, you lose intstant messenger access - and she says But that's the day we're supposed to go on a road trip for a college visit, she says . Which isn't on my calendar. So I call back and reschedule it, and then I call her back. Here's the new date. And she says...ok. With that tone that means That isn't a good day, either. So we're going to need to reschedule again.

Note: everything that worked was the result of memory, and paper, and just messing around. Not in using slick stuff like the net and the cloud. Which, in a nutshell, is why I don't trust 'the cloud'. Because sometimes, things break. Things you rely on. Things that the masters of the universe say everyone should use. But sometimes, maybe not. Because sometimes, the luddites are right.