Today’s the day – or the season – when your mother-in-law asks you to fix her five year old laptop, unclog the wifi (it’s usually her husband, “stealing it all”) or explain why her mouse mat is actually easily large enough – she just needs to lift the mouse up and place it back in the middle if she can’t get the cursor to go any further right.
Lucky me: I didn’t even have to wait till Christmas Day this year: my m-in-law called us at home a couple of days ago to complain that “the email thingy isn’t working on my tablet and the Chrome has gone”. After establishing that her Chrome Book (upstairs) was fine, and she just couldn’t be bothered to ascend the stairs to use it for the two days before we came to visit and I could debug her tablet problem in person, I proceeded to debug the problem over the crackly wireless DECT phone they keep attached to their land line, instead[1].
Despite the difficulty in making out approximately 25% of the words down the line, I became more and more convinced that even if her tablet was having problems, then a reboot of her router was probably due.
Me: so you know which one the router is?
Her: umm…
Me: it’s the little box where the Internet comes in.
Her: is it in the hall?
Me, to the wife, who’s smirking, since she managed to offload this call to me: could it be in the hall?
Wife: yes, it’s in the hall.
Me: yes, it’s in the hall.
Mother-in-law: OK.
Me: there should be a power button on the front or the back, or you can just pull the power lead out if that’s easiest.
Her, clearly bending over to look at it: shall I just turn it off at the wall? That might be simplest?
Me: well, OK.
Her: Right, I’m doing that n… BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP.
It turns out that her DECT phone hub is plugged into the same socket. Of course. This is my life. This is OUR life.
Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year to you all.
1 – this, folks, is how to stay married for 23 and a half years[2].
2 – and counting.
Alice, Eve and Bob - a security blog 