Cav's Place

Sunday started with waiting for my parents to leave, since they said they’ll be away for some hours but they were still here and not about to head out the door when I woke up. Actually, by the time they did leave I was slightly caught up in something, so it was a while longer until I started cleaning my room, as I hadn’t in probably about a month. Changed the sheets as well, watched a part of the day’s ski jumping event while glancing at a couple of things on-line, then at around 4:30 PM went to the kitchen to eat, returning to my room around 5:40 PM, when I noticed that I not only had no Internet access, but the LED on my switch displaying the status for the port the cable coming from the top of the building is in was off.
That was obviously a serious matter, and I needed it fixed that evening, both because I had no second post on here that week and because the next meeting of the United We Save Community was Monday and I needed to know the details, plus that I had apparently gotten myself somewhat involved in coming up with the rules for a new internal voting system and would obviously not say much of anything face to face, so needed to be able to post my ideas ahead of time. As such, after a few minutes of pacing around the room, I tried to call the people from the network I’m in before the fact that I was about to call someone had a chance to fully hit me and make me freeze completely.
Called the landline, but nobody answered, which was normal on a Sunday, and especially in the evening. Then I called the first listed mobile number and did get an answer, somehow managing to more or less say where I am and what the problem is while stammering enough to need to repeat more than once. It was a brief call, the person I was talking to simply saying they’re not working in the area, asking whose name the contract is on and saying he’ll see if anyone is available to help me.
Then I resumed pacing, with heart racing and almost shitting myself since I had just talked to someone, and on the phone as well, until parents got back around 6:45 PM. At that point, I told dad to call them again, but he tried all the listed numbers, including the one I had called, and got no answer except to be told that one of them is a wrong number. Eventually, around 8 PM, he tried again and did get an answer from the same person I had called, but was told only that other people from the area called as well, so this person who was answering called others to see what’s going on, but he’s not in the area and can’t tell us more himself.
As such, the only solution was for dad to give me his mobile Internet thing, which usually barely crawls when it even works at all and doesn’t take well to opening more than one page at a time. That wasn’t going to help me post something here, since the security settings I have would have made it difficult and, either way, I didn’t want to log on to such an important account off that thing, but I did eventually manage to get a brief post, which I had already written in a file, thrown on LiveJournal. That required struggling for so long I even ended up trying to use dad’s new phone, which he took the opportunity to ask me a few things about, but after being about as frustrated with the touchscreen “keyboard” as I knew I’d be I went back to waiting and reloading on the computer until I finally had something to serve as evidence that I did write two posts before the end of the week, even if the second wasn’t actually posted here in time. Moved it here, with the original date and time, minutes after the issue was finally solved.

When I woke up on Monday, dad said he was told the problem was fixed and that we should reset our switch if it still doesn’t work, which obviously couldn’t be true since the lack of any signal even when plugging that cable into another port made it obvious the problem wasn’t on my end. So he passed on that message and was told they’ll go back to the top of the building later that evening to see what else is going on, leaving me to head for that meeting while being pretty much in the dark and without having sent any more of my suggestions and proposals.
When I returned, close to 11:30 PM and with rather long posts including all that I wanted to say while there already “written” in my mind, I found out the problem still wasn’t fixed, but dad was promised it will be by 11 AM on Tuesday. However, I had little reason to believe that, since he said he was told they had tracked down the cause to some other cable a few buildings away from here, which obviously could not result in this lack of any signal between my switch and the one they have at the top of the building. So I was getting more than a little suspicious and very worried, which also meant I wasn’t in the right state of mind to even put those ideas I had in a file, in order to have it ready to post at a later time.

Tuesday, I set my alarm since I had to be at the dentist again that afternoon and wanted to eat and also have a little time to catch up before leaving. However, the situation was unchanged and dad actually went to ask them what’s going on face to face, but the person at the desk said they’re still working on replacing cables and don’t know more at the moment. Worse, they didn’t seem to know more later either, when he called them again after it got dark and all they could do was apologize profusely and promise to finally solve the issue the next day, without offering more details or reasonable explanations.
Needless to say, I was growing even more worried and was starting to be convinced it’s something they either can’t or don’t want to solve but won’t tell us, simply waiting for us to leave on our own, or perhaps they were going out of business or being taken over. Worse, my computer also froze completely that evening, while playing The Witcher, requiring me to press the reset button and giving me one more thing to worry about. The game does tend to crash and I did notice signs that it was about to shortly before it happened, but completely freezing the system is entirely different, so I ended up afraid to do pretty much anything anymore.
Still, I had a protest to go to Wednesday and didn’t even know the time, and when plugging in the mobile Internet thing I noticed that for a while it claimed a 3G connection that actually worked. Not at that high a speed, but I seemed to be getting a bandwidth ranging between a few and several hundred kbps when what usually happens when it claims the connection is above EDGE is that it freezes or disconnects and won’t reconnect until it’s unplugged and plugged back in, so I made use of that, caught up with a few things and also gave in and logged on Facebook long enough to get the information I needed. If I’d have looked around more, both then and in the morning, I’d have noticed quite a few other actions planned for Wednesday, but I didn’t.

With the protest set to start at 1 PM, I woke up at 11 AM, noticed the problem still wasn’t solved and then left together with dad, as he had to leave at the same time and we were both taking the metro. That meant I was next to him when he was called to finally be told what to me seemed obvious all along, namely that our cable will need to be replaced as well. Then again, it likely needed to be replaced anyway, considering the poor state I knew it was in after eight and a half years, and when the problem first appeared I assumed it was caused by it failing completely due to the weather we had lately, so in a way this was good news.
Of course, with both of us being away, he had to tell them to wait until later, calling them when he was on the way back, when they said they were fixing something else and will get back to him after they’ll be done with that. Sadly, when he called them again about an hour later, they said it’ll have to wait until Thursday, because it’s already dark and they tried doing what has to be done in the dark and can’t manage it. So I was still stuck on the mobile Internet, but at least it was stable for hours, the available bandwidth seeming very clearly limited to 100 kbps, which was what I had noticed at other times when it claimed a stable EDGE connection as well.
Back to that conversation that took place when dad called again, we finally got a proper explanation, namely that somebody had cut their cables in the area and the cleaning lady had called them that day to point out the pile that had been brought or thrown down. In addition, those cables that went down the side of the building to each apartment that’s in this network were somehow tied to the top so they won’t fall as well, so what happened won’t be immediately obvious. They said only them and the administrator should have the key to the door that allows access to the top of these buildings, so the plan for Thursday included having a serious talk with him to figure out how exactly something like that could happen, plus of course replacing ours as well.

The problem was that Thursday I had to go to the dentist yet again, as she wanted to schedule me this week to fix a cavity discovered on Tuesday, expecting many people wanting to come next week, which is the last before they’ll go on vacation for the holidays. Thankfully, I was scheduled for 3:30 PM, but the problem was that dad had to be somewhere in the morning, so catching us both at home before dark seemed difficult until he said he can arrange matters to come back around noon, which he actually did.
So, to finally bring this to an end, after he had to even remove my window to be able to reach the old cable, we pulled both of them, as in the one coming from the top of the building and the unused one going from here to the other bedroom, inside and got the new one through that same hole and hooked in the same manner in a way that made it stay some distance from any window. That meant that all that was left for the guy to do after finishing the work at the top was to put a jack at the end of it while telling us that, despite its current state, the old cable was very solid while he’s uncertain how long this new one will withstand the elements, but it was what they could find at the moment.
I did ask why did it take so long and why did we get such strange explanations at first and he said they knew what happened since Monday, but they first had to deal with their equipment, which had also been tampered with, and then they were faced with a huge tangled mess of cut cables and had to make some sense of it, probably since some of them may not have been theirs and some of their customers in the area may not have been affected, so they wanted to make sure they won’t make it even worse. On the other hand, though the old cable was actually ours, paid for when I first got in another network after being thrown back here, he not only didn’t charge anything for the new one but vehemently refused when dad tried to offer him something for his efforts.

Of course, the main problem now is that, even though the administrator seems perfectly fine with allowing these cables here and said he’ll try to keep an eye out, there’s nothing actually stopping whoever did it from doing it again, since there are ways to get up there that anyone with some determination can make use of. And the culprits are likely to be quite determined, as this guy said there’s no doubt in his mind that we’re talking about the usual suspects, seeing as they made them an offer to sell the network and they refused, and that they also had cables that they tried to put inside buildings hacked apart. So all we can do at the moment is hope they’ll be left alone, at least for a while…