I thought it would work when I bought a HomePlug AV adapter set, which is a pretty new technology which routes your Internet via electric pulses on your existing power cable.

I know that must have sounded like jargon, so basically it’s something that lets you go on the Internet… using your power line!

I thought it was interesting, my dad thought it was interesting, and the sales guy at Fry’s thought it was especially interesting (it was more of the sale for him, though).

So we spent a hundred and a half dollars and came home with it, happy, tired, but satisfied.

The next morning, we tried it out in the computer room. We plugged one to a plug and connected it to our Internet connection, and another into another plug. We connected the second one to my laptop.

Everything worked perfectly, and I was overly excited. Imagine what this would be like for my mom when we were done and had her computer set up downstairs!

So we brought the big desktop tower to downstairs, connected everything, and…

It didn’t work.

We tried refreshing, and then we ran upstairs to see if the connector to the Internet had fallen off, been stepped on, anything.

But there was nothing wrong.

Angered, we realized that perhaps upstairs and downstairs didn’t share a circuit?

We tried calling technical support for the company, but the poor service guy didn’t know what was wrong, and called his supervisor, which also didn’t know what was wrong.

In the end, in a last attempt, my dad and I tried my laptop downstairs. We lumbered around with the plug and found a plug in the breakfast table room.

We plugged it in, heart sinking, and looked…

Surprise! It worked!

My dad and I were shocked speechless. We tried the room where we were trying to set up the computer in… but, alas, the status remained the same.

I kept on trying, until mysteriously, I decided to try one spot. It didn’t work.

Frustrated, I kept on refreshing the page until, after about one minute, it worked!

I looked at my dad. “Can we go and try the room again?” He knew what “the room” meant.

So we blundered into the room. I plugged it in. It didn’t work.

I tried for a minute. It still didn’t work. Just as I was about to give up… it worked.

I looked at my dad. The color had come back to his cheeks. We both gave a little snort. A little happy snort.

It had worked.

The next second we were wooping and hi-fiving each other. We went and got the computer and carried it down.

We plugged it in and waited.

At first, it wouldn’t work. But we waited, and sure enough, it worked.

This time, we wooped for even longer…

This afternoon, the second day from the installation, my mother told me, “I woke up with such a happy feeling of being able to write” (for she was a writer) “on my computer.”

“I turned on my computer…” She paused for climax…

“It didn’t work.”

I gawked.

So here I am, at this very moment, looking at documentation, doing work that I shouldn’t be doing…

It is like this with new technology. New technology is the easy way. The easy way is like that.

*sigh*