On odd package locations and the stress thereof.
I moved almost a month ago. I hope never again to move in December;
between the increased workload from people being on vacation, moving
and cleaning and unpacking, of being in an unfamiliar place with
unfamiliar people, buying presents for people in my family, the
annual mini-depression that comes on over the holidays, oh, and
still being behind on everything from the surgery six weeks before
the move, things got quite difficult. One thing that I didn't
mention that made the month far worse is that I didn't have a net
connection at home in December. My work involves monitoring the
running of a large system, and with no net connection, I had to be
at work ludicrous numbers of hours, which not only took a lot of
time I needed to do these other things, but more subtly took away
a lot of my opportunities to do reasonable stress-reduction and
pressed my time so much that the rest of it became much harder to
bear.

I hate to write things that sound like I'm whining about my life.
I'm really not. I am quite happy with my life in general, and this
month I got to discover some of the things that work and don't work
when I am exposed to a number of stressors at once.

But this is a brief story about signing up for the net connection.
I signed up for my DSL connection as soon as possible after I got
my new phone number, and the DSL provider said 1-3 weeks. And,
right on time, I got email a few days ago from my DSL provider,
telling me that my DSL line was now connected and everything should
be fine and they hoped I was happy with it and so on and so forth.
This was, I confess, a bit of a surprise, since I hadn't received
the router or anything like that.

So I went to their website to poke around and find out whom to call.
They have a very good website; I can access the status of my order
in real time. And not only did they give a date the hardware had
been shipped to me, but they had a tracking number. So I went to
the website of the shipping company and input the tracking number
and found out that it had been delivered. On 24 Dec. A full WEEK
before the day I was checking. A week in which I had spent much
too much time at work because it was the only way I could do my job
without DSL. What was going on?

My housemates are S and O. O was out of town for all of December
and is expected back mid-January. I went home later, and S was
there watching television. I told him what I had found out on the
website and asked if he had any idea what might have happened to
the package. He said no, and then said, "Oh, I just remembered.
A package came for O at that time." The phone line is in O's name,
and the DSL company has been very unclear at times about who is
actually placing this order, sending me email addressed to O and
such, so I was wondering if it might have come for O.

"Oh, that's probably it," I said. "Where is it?"

"I put it in the refrigerator," he said.

I did a double-take and stood sort of boggling for a moment. S
explained, "I didn't know what it was. I thought it might be food."

I went to the refrigerator, and sure enough, there was a nicely
chilled DSL router. S's reasoning sounds ludicrous, but it was the
day before Christmas, and people do ship food frequently at that
time of year, and there was no indication on the box as to what it
might be. It's a pity I hadn't noticed it before. Anyway, I
dropped by work today is to get the IP address and other information
I need to get connected. With any luck, this will make my life
easier.