The adventure delineated in last week’s Letter ended on a high note - I recovered my telephone number from the jaws of Mint Mobile (only took four days of continual effort!), I got it successfully transferred to Xfinity, and I got a third line successfully set up. It took an additional three hours to get those latter items accomplished, of course, but nonetheless - ultimate success.
Which left a vacuum in my life! No more electronic headaches. My life was a calm and placid lake of quiet contemplation, an ode to the joys of rest and relaxation.
In other words, the balance of the universe was off. Oh my, that would never do! In a trice Clotho, the spinner of Man’s fate, sent a quick text to the goddess Lectra, the highly charged overseer of all things electronic. She promptly assessed my situation and, hesitating not even another millisecond, zapped another problem into my life to fill my empty hours.
See? The universe isn’t a vast and uncaring expanse, after all - it DOES care!
This excellent new issue involved my home’s Wi-Fi. From last week’s Letter you learned of my attempt to improve my phone coverage, through the ultimately futile avenue of changing suppliers. My town is well known as having cell coverage just slightly worse than that in the middle of the Kalahari desert. And in the illogical way that humans operate, this lousy cell coverage colored my perception of everything communications-related. Specifically, my Wi-Fi. The combination of losing all cell service in my basement with losing my Wi-Fi signal in my garage, and outside my house led me to think “Hmmmm, maybe I need a new router system”.
This wasn’t 100% insane as I’ve long held that anything electronic is, after five years, complete crap. Technology will have moved forward so fast that after five years it will be causing more pain than pleasure and replacing the device with a new one would cost way less than originally expended and provide way more capability than currently supplied.
Thus I had decided to purchase a new Eero mesh router system. And, seeing as my existing system was already Eero supplied, I figured it would be easy peasy. Just open the Eero app on my phone and tell it to change over to the new units.
I suppose if Lectra hadn’t decided to star me in her new episode of Frustrate a Human, it might even have worked smoothly.
She was tricky though. Because it all began smoothly.
I followed the app’s directions, plugged in all my new units (and plugged in the old one as part of the new system. All good? Seemingly so! I rejoiced at seeing three bars of Wi-Fi and at the expansive world of the internet that leaped forth from my phone. In the house AND outside - many bars of Wi-Fi! Yes, it all seemed good. Tooooo good.
I didn’t realize what the big oops would be until that evening when I eventually turned on my big screen TV. Uh oh … Mr. Oled isn’t loading anything. No Netflix. No Amazon Prime. No nuttin’.
Is the problem the Apple TV that supplies those channels to Mr. Oled, perhaps?
I did as a modern day consumer technology would do. I removed the Wi-Fi from settings and re-entered it. I turned Mr. Oled and Ms. Apple TV on and off. I turned the entire router on and off. I even said the magic words “^#^$&###&!!!”
All to no avail. And so, reluctantly, I called up “tech” support at Eero.
I say reluctantly because I knew from a prior call that I wouldn’t be speaking with a steely eyed missile man but rather a sleepy eyed minimum wage man in front of a computer monitor with lots of how-to prompts. One who would incessantly apologize for the inconvenience and thank me over and over and over for my patience. Leavened with a constantly expressed delight at helping me with my problem.
Perhaps it paints me as a curmudgeon but I HATE having to listen to corporately enforced dialogue that, to me, makes the person on the other end conceptually indistinguishable from a pre-recorded computer algorithm.
I’ll spare you the tedious details and cut to the chase that what he ultimately did was rename my Wi-Fi remotely (they can do that?!) after I had, at his direction, changed a setting a few minutes before. The result being - the Mr. Oled was working again! What he did didn’t make any sense to me so I asked why what he did made a difference. His answer?
“I don’t know what was wrong and I don’t really know why this fixed it.”
Ah. Just the sort of iron-clad competence that I love to see in action.
But then he broke the news:
“Thank you very much for your patience, sir, because now that the Wi-Fi has been renamed you’ll have to reconnect all your devices manually. I see on my end that they are all disconnected. They all expect the old name so they can’t connect. But at least your TV is now connected!”
Note that I, like you, have quite a few Wi-Fi devices. My Ring doorbell. My floodlight cams. My Sonos speakers. My printer. Etc. All of which need their Wi-Fi information entered in different ways, some inconvenient, some REALLY inconvenient.
I paused for a moment, turning the matter over this way and that, studying all the angles.
“So you’re saying I need to manually reconnect all these devices one by one, right?” I asked.
“That’s right,” he said.
“Find each one’s app and tell it to forget the old information and instead to use your newborn Wi-Fi name and password.”
“Yes sir, that’s correct.”
I gave it a few more seconds, wondering if he’d notice a better solution to this difficulty. But, hearing nothing, I went on to say:
“You know, it seems to me that a WAY easier approach would simply be to change the name of my home’s Wi-Fi. Change it FROM the name you just changed it to without my permission BACK to the original name. The name I prefer, the name that every device in the house is expecting, and the name that all my visitors’ phones will be expecting. Why can’t I simply do that, with the same password as always, and let everything reconnect on their own? And let Mr. Oled know as well.”
My Eero genius furrowed his brow. He thought. And he thought. And then he thought some more.
“I … guess you could,” he finally replied.
“Yeah, I’ve already done so,” I answered.
And so, once again, the butterfly of peace and happiness spread its diaphanous wings about my humble abode. Until Lectra chances to glance down again and sees that my life is trundling along just a bit too easily …
And THAT’S THAT, for now, with pesky electrons. Time for something more real. Solid stuff, not invisible information flowing through circuits. Solid, heavy matter.
What I have to offer next is ADVICE! Real world, tested, advice. GOOD advice, in fact. About wood.
If you, like me, occasionally cook this and that, you undoubtedly also chop and slice a bit. And the chances are good that you might own a cutting board. Now if you do and it’s some sort of plastic dealie, then my advice will be of zero use. This advice has to do with good old fashioned wooden cutting boards.
It so happens that I own two regular workhorses. One is a medium sized board that’s made from a single piece of wood. And the other is a fancy schmancy Boos hard rock maple cutting board that weighs around eight pounds (but feels like it’s WAY more).
It’s a heavy beast. Twelve pounds, in fact. And it was pretty pricey. Still is, from what I can see. (The middle one here is mine.)
I got it many years ago, back when I was a happy go lucky, mindless goofball. One who didn’t worry about things like … maintenance. Which meant that one fine day I realized one of the wood joinery seams had actually become more of a … crack?!
Here’s how the junior sleuth can detect such a thing if they ever come across it. Bad join, good join:
I’d started noticing it at some point but really didn’t pay attention for some months. Years? But FINALLY I got motivated enough to stick my fingernail in it and realize, yep, it really seemed to be coming apart. And then I started to look into how to care for good cutting boards, something I SHOULD have done at the start. Something John Boos makes super clear, btw. But happy go lucky goofballs don’t listen to stuff like that, do they?
The deal is, and I feel soooo dumb to have not realized this, cutting boards need to be oiled regularly. Like, once a month. Something that up until then I’d been doing once a never.
So what I did was buy a couple of bottles of cutting board oil (basically food safe oil with other magical ingredients) and slathered the Boos with it.
Well, eventually I did. First I came up with a nifty way to prepare the surface, something I should also have been doing regularly but hadn’t. Prior to becoming a born again board maintainer, I’d just wipe off the board when I was done with my food prep. Occasionally I’d run soapy water over it and rinse.
But I couldn’t help noticing that that wasn’t really super effective. The board sometimes … smelled.
Solution? I thought - why not use my stainless steel pastry cutter, the thing I use to rid my counter of dried dough, and slide it against the edge of the cutting board - using it to shave off any surface gunk? And you know what? It got a lot of gunk. Yay!
Once the top surface had been scraped clean, I liberally dosed it with the Boos oil, using my fingers to rub it all over. And WHOOSH! The wood just sucked it up. Seriously, it was amazing how quickly that oil got absorbed. It seemed less like wood and more like cellulose sponge. So I added some more and let it sit overnight.
Next morning almost all the oil had AGAIN been absorbed. I wiped whatever was left off, flipped the board and repeated the procedure. And then went back to using it normally.
A month later, I did it again. And again. In fact, I have my phone set to remind me to do it on the first of each month. And shockingly, amazingly, the falling apart has been halted and it even seems to have gotten better. It no longer sucks up oil like a dry sponge and there’s only one isolated tiny crack left. Mostly it’s solid as the rock of Gibralter. And cleaning the surface of gunk with my pastry scraper is now a regular thing. The board feels like new and looks ready to serve me well for the foreseeable future.
So there you go. Do YOU have a cutting board that’s crying out for help and you simply haven’t been listening? If you do … now you know what you need to do about it!
(PS: If any of you are reading this on an iPad - is the scrolling working for you? My wife was trying to read it this AM with her coffee and rather than scrolling smoothly it stayed stuck in one place and/or moved in a bizarre fashion if she sloooowed down the swiping motion. Perhaps Lectra at her tricks again? Anyway, she had to finish reading on my computer as the iPad just wouldn’t cooperate, even with a restart.)
Nickyitis
And ELF continues to learn more about those crazy humans.
As always - let me know your thoughts and dreams in the comments!:
And sharing is easy too!:
Wow, the things you figure out, Crowden--like how to restore wooden boards and bowls and WiFi names! Jeff had a similar experience when he changed his WiFi password. I think the frustration was life-threatening (but luckily he's still with us!). As for using a pastry scraper to remove old gunk from a board--that's sheer genius! Love the cartoons too!