Internet Mayhem

While I love Italy, no one would accuse me of being an over-the-top Italophile. Our most recent go’round with the internet has reminded me of the contrasts between Italy and our home in the US. With technology in Italy, if it isn’t one thing it is another.

It is interesting that Italy skipped an entire generation of information infrastructure. Cable TV never made it big here. The process of laying that much copper and later fiber optic cable was never really feasible. It isn’t as simple as stringing another wire on a transmission pole that somebody already owns. Here, all the phone and power lines are tacked in conduits to the exterior walls of houses and running cable through 18” thick stone walls is a whole different experience than drilling a hole through a wooden sill and sticking a cable through. Italians found it more effective to pull in a signal off of a satellite. When the internet went fiber optic, Italians were stuck. Fortunately for them, the pace of technological change meant that they quickly leapfrogged to pulling their data off of their cell phone/data provider. Even now, a fair fraction of Italian homes don’t have internet in the way we think of it. They either surf on handhelds or use a phone company data dongle in a USB port to work wirelessly off a lap/desk top.

As part of our job, SYA provides internet access. They do it through the use of antiquated HDSL connections. It is many steps better than dial-up, but still full of wonderful issues. To recap our experiences. When we arrived 19 months ago, the telephone number we had been assigned had been blacklisted for non-payment of their bill. Left hand, right hand, yada, yada. It took almost two weeks for them to finally figure out that was the case and promise to hook us up. But, that didn’t happen because it turned out our phone number was on a double secret black list since it was formerly a company that skipped on its bills. In the end, it took almost a month to finally get service. Why they couldn’t have just assigned us a different telephone number a week into the process, I don’t know. Then, a few months later we were suddenly without internet or phone. The bill hadn’t been paid, but no bill had ever been received. Typical Italian snafu. That happened a total of two times before the automatic, online billing finally got squared away. Each time we were without service for a week or more. Then, we moved to our new apartment in August. This time the modem was so old it had no wireless and ran on dial-up. Of course, the school had been paying for HDSL service for years, but previous occupants of the apartment hadn’t realized the wireless wasn’t working because they had been pulling in free wireless from the bar below us. Working through all of that took weeks, although we did have service most of the time through the aforementioned Break Bar.

That brings us to the most recent round of internet mayhem. A few months after we moved in, we arranged for a cleaning lady to come once a week for a couple of hours and help keep the place respectable. She does a great job, but we noticed that after every cleaning the internet would be down and it was usually quite a struggle to get it back. We finally figured out that she was unplugging the power strip with modem, computers, etc. to plug in the vacuum cleaner. I put a polite note on the strip asking her not to do that, and everything was fine for 3-4 weeks. Then, I got tired of having a piece of paper on the floor, so I picked it up and recycled it. Stupid me. This Thursday, the very next time she came, what did we find when we came home? A non-functioning modem, of course. This time it was messed up so bad that we couldn’t get it to reboot. Fortunately, our Resident Director’s wife was an internet tech geek/trouble shooter in a former life a decade ogo, and she managed to get us back online again last night after several rounds of calls to the phone company, which neither Amy or I could have done, reloading the software on our machines, internally resetting the modem, etc. I’m thinking of getting the Italian equivalent of the bumper sticker you used to see in the US and attaching it to the power strip. You know, the one that says, “If you can read this, you’re too close!”

Going without internet can be refreshing, IF it is intentional. We spent a fantastic three weeks in Peru and Argentina a number of years ago without missing it a bit. However, if you can’t get it and miss it, it is like being thirsty on a raft in the middle of an ocean. I was slowly adjusting to it: reading more books, taking walks, going to sleep earlier and even working on the computer without being connected. A few more days and I would have been OK with it. Now that I am back online, I am beginning to wonder if that wasn’t simply the Italian way of reminding me to slow down and enjoy life. In six months I will be in the US wishing I was back here, crappy HDSL and all.