Inventory and a Boom

Saturday was spent taking inventory.

Not of my life – did that years ago and worked through most of my issues, except forgiveness. I still have a hard time with that but taking inventory in the sense of making a list and taking photos in preparation for obtaining renters insurance.

Renters insurance is not required at this complex. Nevertheless, I’ve thought about it every time we’ve had a fire in the area, and decided against it because the things I valued couldn’t be insured.

What got me thinking about it again are the seniors displaced by the fire at the Santa Rosa complex. I thought about the fact there's a new television in the unit, two new laptops, an exercise bike and I would need, at the very least, to replace the This End Up platform bed, night stand, sofa, dining table, book cases. After researching how much it would cost to replace those and other essential items, I find, notwithstanding the things it would kill me to lose, I do need enough renters’ insurance to cover the basics.

So, photos and making a list was Saturday’s project.

The plan for today was to make good use of the fabric left over from the kente cloth gluttee by using the excess fabric to recover throw pillows I’ve fallen out-of-like with.

That plan was scrapped when, around 11:00, I heard what sounded like one of the downstairs neighbors slamming their door really hard. The building shook, the television shook and went to black.

I kept fooling around with the remote, turning the TV off/on, pushing random buttons for some time with no results. Logging onto the computer to seek remote service, I found I had no internet, no Wi-Fi service. I could see connections surrounding mine appeared to be connected, so somehow it was just me in this building.

After dialing up the cable service provider, following steps, I ended up with a message to “wait it out”, that there was probably an outage in the area.

Sure there was, but it appeared to be just me.

At any rate, I put in some time on my needlepoint project and adjusted to the quiet for another hour before checking Wi-Fi connection.

It was back on, but now the television wouldn’t connect to Wi-Fi.

Dialing up the television technical support line, I was walked through factory reset.

What a nightmare experience that was.

The poor agent spent no less than two hours walking me through steps, with me not understanding what buttons to push on the remote to get from Point A to Point B, doing it wrong, restarting, hitting roadblocks that necessitated the poor girl running back/forth between me and her supervisor to figure out what to try next AND, when we finally got past the factory reset, the screen made me set up a Samsung account before we could continue and get picture, which was a whole nother nightmare, at which point I “lost” the agent.

I say “lost” because I think she accidentally on purpose got exhausted with me and hung up.

It was a solo hunt and peck the next hour and a half, but I got it done.

I have to say though, I didn’t like the fact I had to set up a Smart Account to get to television, including name, email address, date of birth. Whatever happened to simple plug and play? The guys who delivered and set the television up didn’t have to go through all those steps, so I’m thinking I jammed up the works when I was randomly pushing buttons trying to get the television back on before I realized it was off because there was no Wi-Fi.

It wasn’t until around 3:30 when everything returned to normal, at which time I logged onto facebook and discovered my buddy Apache has posted that an accident had happened on the property.

Heading outside I discovered it wasn’t a door being slammed that knocked out my Wi-Fi, it was someone moving in hitting the gas, instead of brake, losing control of their U-Haul truck, smashing the wall of a building all the way in to the equipment boxes.

It wasn’t my building but, evidently, it was where my server connection is located.

I didn’t see the responsible resident hanging around the scene, but I did see the Complex Manager and the No. 2 maintenance guy had been called in, neither of whom live on the property and had to come from home while we have the Head Maintenance Guy and Assistant Manager on site.

Go figure.

What a horrible, embarrassing and expensive thing to happen to the individual moving in, but thankfully she wasn't hurt -- and I hear it's a woman, and thankfully she didn't hit any parked cars or people walking dogs in the area.

Hopefully repairs won’t knock the Wi-Fi out yet and again.

Bake Sale to benefit the seniors displaced by Northern California Fires is tomorrow. Totally exhausted by today's technical issues, my decision is to take the easy way out and donate cash to the bake sale.