“The whole digital enchilada – interactive, cable, broadband, 500-channel…”
Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age
One for the nostalgia buffs! I bet that you never thought you’d find yourself face to face with that particular rubric again…
The ever-procacious Urban Dictionary curls its lip at the moniker thus:
“Laughably outdated term for the Internet. Mostly used during the 90s by yuppies who made their own awful-looking web pages.”
…and again:
“A cheesy, ebullient, woefully outdated term from the 90’s, which means ‘Internet’. Coined when all the people were massively wowed by the sheer awesomeness of the Intertubes. Nowadays in disuse unless you use it for comedy.”
Yup – comedy! That’s the effect I was going for… How am I doin’? How ’bout now? etc, etc…
‘Holy moly!’ – you’re thinking – ‘what in the name of Al Gore is he doing raking up this sort of muck in 2014?’
Well – back in the day when it was the Information Superhighway I ordered an upgrade for our broadband connection (yes – the very same that was dead as a dodo for six weeks over Christmas!) to an all-new super-fast fibre (or fiber, as our trans-Atlantic cousins would have it) broadband circuit! And – guess what? It finally came!!!
Ok – I exaggerate the timescale slightly – for effect, you know! But by the time that we actually got to order the thing last October we had already been a target for generic flyers from the mephitic British Telecom – advertising their new fibre service – for at least a couple of years… long before it was actually available anywhere in the surrounding neighbourhood.
When our ISP eventually informed us that fibre was finally available at our local exchange I was, naturally, on the phone immediately – placing an order. The niceties observed, a date was fixed for an engineer to pay us a visit to do the necessary. Splendid!
Except – you’ll be unsurprised to hear – that it didn’t happen. It turned out that though the fibre service had been installed at the exchange it had not actually got as far as the cabinet in the street outside our domicile.
A new date for installation was set… and missed! Then another… and another…
At one point our ISP cruelly raised hopes that something was about to happen by sending us our new high-speed router. When – however – I called excitedly to check, they admitted that they had made a mistake. Bah!
In the end it was five increasingly resigned months before finally – and quite suddenly – an appointment was made and not broken… and we found ourselves on the end of an InterWebNet pipe that is actually fat enough to carry the traffic that the Kickass Canada Girl requires. For now – anyway…
This does all make me realise that we need to start checking now regarding the broadband situation on the Saanich peninsular. Having experienced a whiff of bandwidth freedom I can’t see The Girl settling in future for anything less…
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