The Tubes Are Full

(Please note that Poetry Monday is on hiatus with Diane somewhere in the sunny south! Regular programming may or may not resume at some point; it's unclear at the moment. In the meantime, feel free to leave your poem, on a topic of your choice, in the comments here. Or you may leave your address in the comments with a note that we can find your poem on your blog.)


Dear Fellow Internet Users,

For almost two weeks, the Donkey House computer has been experiencing frequent slowdowns, often to the point of complete stoppage. I am becoming all too familiar with the following critter:

What IS that critter, anyway? Is it meant to look like something in current popular culture?? I get that it's holding a map, but WHAT IS THAT CRITTER SUPPOSED TO BE??

Here it is, up close. I still don't know what it is, no matter how big it gets.

At first, I used all the well-known, non-techie manoeuvres: clicking the mouse button over and over, clicking the mouse button a little (or a lot) harder than necessary, clicking the mouse button as quickly as possible, clicking the mouse button as slowly as possible, staring at the screen, giving the screen the side-eye, pretending not to watch the screen at all, swearing at the computer, apologizing to the computer, pretending I didn't care, etc., etc., but not a single one of those things worked consistently.

So I moved on to actual thinking and troubleshooting.

Maybe our computer had a virus. After all, it is flu season in the northern hemisphere. A virus scan showed that two Trojan horses had indeed tried to infiltrate our computer. However, they had been contained by the anti-virus program and we were able to eliminate them. And because they had been contained, they should not really have been the source of the issue at all.

Next, I reset our modem, because I've been told it needs to be done now and then if there seems to be a problem connecting to the internet. I don't know all the technicalities, I just know that it means a trip to the basement, unplugging some stuff and plugging the same stuff back in, and it might or might not improve things, depending. Depending on what? I have no idea.

I reset that thing at least ten times. I didn't keep an actual count, but I can assure you that ten is a conservative estimate. At twelve stair steps per one-way trip, it was a pretty good workout, especially for a bum knee.

Nothing helped. Our internet connection was non-existent at this point. I know this because the little icon at the bottom of the screen that shows the four bars when we have a good connection was now showing a yellow exclamation mark instead. Sometimes it shows a red X which means the same thing, and I don't know why it's one way sometimes and the other way other times, but it is, and I've learned to be comfortable with partial knowledge, as long as it eventually turns back into four bars of magical connection.

So at the point where there was zero connection, I had a nap.

And when I woke up, the internet was fine. It was more normal than it had been in ages, in terms of speed and connectivity. For a few hours I thought perhaps resetting the modem had worked, but with a time lag.

Hah.

The next morning, it was back to being slow loading pages, or refusing to load them at all. I don't know anymore if it's a connectivity issue or a loading issue, or if there's any difference between the two. AND I DON'T CARE. (Pretending not to care again.)

The only theory I have left is that the tubes must be full. You know, those "the internet is a series of tubes" tubes. For anyone who has not heard of this meme, it is part of a statement made in 2006 by former Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens when he was criticizing an amendment to a bill; the amendment essentially supported net neutrality but the late Senator didn't believe it was a good thing. You can read more at this Wikipedia entry.

Here is the excerpt from his speech which contains the "series of tubes" comment:

"Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got… an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday [Tuesday]. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially. 

"[…] They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material."
 
It's 2018. Clearly the tubes are now filled.

With "enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material."


I've always pictured the internet tubes like this:

Large, sparkly, and unfillable

But it is becoming painfully clear that the internet tubes are more like this:

That's right. Skinny, blue, and no capacity at all.

The truth is such a disappointment.

So, Fine People of the Internet, I must ask you to stop filling the internets with "enormous amounts of material" in order that the rest of us can get on once in a while.


Thanking you in advance,

The Donkey
XOXOXO


Both internet interpretations are provided by Pixabay, as usual. Thank you, Pixabay; you always know just what's in my head and have a picture for it.