Some Surprises Are Not Nice:

I usually look forward to spending Thursday's in the office. I teach the Adult Bible Study on Wednesday Nights, and I like to unwind somewhat on Thursday's and then start planning and preparing studies or messages for the upcoming week. Thursday's can be a relaxing day of sorts, and some of the time, especially during the summer months, there is very few people in the office; which gives me an opportunity to be alone with my thoughts. 

Well; this past Thursday held a surprise for me that was not nice. Upon arriving at the office, one of the other pastors told me that he could not connect to the internet. This has happened as of late; the internet will drop out and come back on within a few seconds to a minute or so. Not so today: it was down for the count. I have limited knowledge about routers, so I called one of the two IT types that attend our church and cried out, HELP! He was gracious enough to come to the church to see if he could diagnose the problem and get our network back up and running again; NOT!

After trying several things; he had me make a call to our Internet Provider, and while on the phone with them, my IT guy had to leave, but I was confident that they could resolve the issue. That was not to be, as after about 30 min or so, I was informed that due to the face that the router we were using was not one provided by our provider, that they could not complete the repair. 

That was not a nice thing for them to tell me, as we like everyone on the world today depend on the Internet to accomplish our daily work, research or whatever else we may have to do. Well; after conferring with my two resident (we do have others) IT guys, I was off to a local store to purchase a new router. 

Standing in the isle of the store, facing so many choices as to which one to buy, (don't know the difference between a router and a roto-rooter) Did not see the one that one of the IT guys said to look for, then the other IT guy said to look for a different brand and a certain model. Success, found the right one; purchased it and returned to the church with high expectations of getting the office back on line. 

Another surprise that was not nice; installed the new router, did the setup (with limited knowledge, did not learn about routers in Pastoral Care 101) STILL NO INTERNET. Called IT man, he cannot come back to office until next morning. Day was spent from 8:00 AM--3:00 PM working as IT Trainee without success. Frustrated and bummed out, shut off all computers, shut off new router and headed home feeling defeated. ONE BRIGHT NOTE: During this whole process, I was able to Tether my iPad through my smart phone and send out prayer requests that had come in. 

Arrived at the church office early Friday morning to wait for IT guy to arrive to fix router issues. That's strange, turned on my PC in my office, low and behold, an internet connection. How can this be? I turned off the router when I left the office, called both IT guy's with the question; did you come in the office last night and setup the router? Both answered NO! Turned on iPad; Connected; Turned on laptop; Connected; Went into the office where router is located; it was on and seemed to be smiling at me :-) What meaneth this? Entire system was up and running; IT guy shows up and configured the router with proper information for our network, 

Was there an outage that our provider was not aware of? Or was the wonderful world of Technology playing games with me? The mystery continues, but the new router is working far better than the old one with better strength and coverage.