Old clothes, Odd Wires

In which our Hero trips a wire and wires a line

Something about me set off the alarms as I walked into a store today. A group of kids leaving as I entered were stopped by the security guard and I thought nothing more of it, but then when I went to leave, the alarms went again.

“Did you forget to purchase anything?”

No, I didn’t pick up anything?

“Maybe something else you bought?”

I haven’t shopped in a while.

“Get any new clothes? Maybe there’s a tag still in there?”

That’s where I stopped to think. The only piece of clothing I’m wearing that could be said to be less than 6 years old is my baseball hat and my dress shirt. I’m not sure there’s anything in there to set off an alarm.

I think perhaps my personal EM cloud is more likely to be the issue. I’m wearing a lot of things that are either wirelessly connected to each other, or have RF properties. If they’re using RF sensors for theft prevention, I carry active devices that will set their system off.

I don’t know how to figure it out either. Except to wave bits of my stuff through the security gates and set off their store alarms every few minutes. Which would be a little funny for me, but probably annoying as hell for them. Next time, thought, I’m going to wander in without my coat. It’s bigger, heavy and carries way more stuff than it rationally should, so maybe something in there is setting off the alarms.

The sad thought is the realization that very nearly all of my clothes are old. I mean, it’s good from an efficiency point of view, but maybe it’s time to pull the trigger on a wardrobe update.

And now for something completely different

My internet, like my mother’s health problem, has been intermittent since the start of the year. Today, technician number 9 ( by my count) just called and said to me, not making this up: Hi, I’ve got a ticket on your line, but I don’t know what it’s about. Can you describe the problem?

Seriously? Seriously?! I’ve got a shit-ton of documentation in the ticket so that we don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time I get on the phone. So I tell him the long and painful story, summarized this: I’ve had intermittent disconnections of my internet for a month and a half. There’s no pattern or rhythm to the disconnections, sometimes every few minutes.

But then the guy comes over and after some talking, I brief him on the curious state of my telecommunications situation and he says the damnedest thing.

“Why don’t we just run your internet over the other pair of wires? It’d be an unofficial dry loop.”

Well… hell. First, a dry loop (a phone wire without a dial tone) is the next escalation option and I had already priced out how much it would cost and how I was going to tell those people at the internet company that they were going to give me a year of it for free for my troubles (which is a reasonable ask against the rate they collect). And second, it’s a sane, rational way to test the situation and something that *I* would have done, but given how procedure-bound the technician are, I really figured that it was fairly close to a technical impossibility.

But I’m approaching the 12-hour mark since my last outage, which puts things into the “promising” category.

Sorry, dull, I know. 🙂 Gotta post something, or else I get right back to being the guy who doesn’t post at all anymore.