h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

...and at first I thought it had zapped my gaming desktop at home

I wouldn't have had the computer turned on at all if I had been able to tell there was a thunderstorm waiting to happen. It used to be you could tell when a thunderstorm was approaching by distant thunder getting closer, but so far this summer (we've had unusually many) most of them have been of the sneaky type, waiting to explode until right behind or on top of you *shakes fist at weather gods* It has scared the bejeesus out of me a couple of times.

A bright white flash of light followed by a tremendous thunder a split second after caused my computer to restart itself

I turned it off as fast as I could and pulled all the plugs, and the TV plug too, and sat tight until the thundering had ceased. Just to spite me it seemed to hover forever instead of moving on.

And then started the tedious task of trying to figure out what exactly was wrong when I couldn't connect to the Internet. It finally turned out that the lightning had somehow zapped my broadband modem.

And, in best 'Murphy's law' style, this had to happen the week that I had a 'staycation' (vacation spent at home) so no access to company computers.

Oh well, at least a modem is much cheaper to replace than a computer...

Well you do live in the land of Thor

Oh goodness. Modems are replaceable. I'm glad that's all you need to replace.

One day, years ago, I was at my grandmother's house when a thunderstorm struck. Lightning struck the doorbell, and jammed it, so we had constant ringing and chiming until I managed to rip the thing off the wall and disconnect it.

hey mooring tinker and sorry about the modem, at least it had a good send off to the land of modem valhalla! always send my old stuff like that, a high voltage, stuck up the earth wire always makes me feel better



RJR

Sod's Law, being at home with no Internet access

But look on the bright side - at least YOU didn't get frazzled, for which I'm

>>Well you do live in the land of Thor

Of course I wonder if he's displeased with the way he was portrayed in the film?

This all reminded me of that great poem based on Poe's 'The Raven'; 'Abort, Retry, Ignore?'

There I sat, distraught, exhausted, by my own machine accosted.
Getting up I turned away and paced across the office floor.
And then I saw a dreadful sight: a lightning bolt cut through the night.
A gasp of horror overtook me, shook me to my very core.
The lightning zapped my previous data, lost and gone forevermore.
Not even, "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"

The whole poem to be found here:

http://www.globalnets.com/education/htmlbook/poepoem.html

The land of Thor? I'll have you know I live in the same city as Odin. He is a plumber - and good at it