It’s Monday night and you finally collapse into your favorite chair after a day that started at 5:00am. The dogs are crated, the kids are in bed, and your spouse has graciously agreed to do dinner clean-up. You lean your head back and sigh. There’s a whole week’s worth of worry stacked up in your forebrain, but for the next 20 minutes, none of it will matter. The tablet is warm in your hands as you tap the Netflix app, and you smile in anticipation of the one truly good thing that you’ll get to experience today. The theme song is already playing in your head: "Un—BREAKABLE! They’re alive, dammit! It’s a mir-a-cle!" For the next 20 minutes, you can escape.
…except you can’t, because instead of transporting you away from your worries, the stupid screen is showing a giant-ass error message: "Netflix is not available."
The vein in your forehead—you know the one, right at your hairline—starts throbbing. You can feel it. You know what comes next. You can already see it in your mind. You’re going to have to go upstairs into your youngest’s room—because for some incredibly insane reason the cable drop is in there, which makes you want to find the person who built the damn house and throttle them to death with six feet of coax—and you’re going to have to reach back under the kid’s bed, over the dust and the dog hair and the Lego bricks and broken Star Wars toys and whatever the hell else is under there and find the damn plug for the damn router. After you unplug and plug it back in, you’re going to have to lie there watching the damn lights on the stupid thing blink for minutes—whole minutes!—while your tiny window of Netflix time slowly trickles away.
Netflix is not available.
You’ll probably wake up the kid when you’re in there rebooting, and that’ll require at least one trip back down to the kitchen for a glass of water—best to get the water before going up to reboot the router. And the dishes in the kitchen—they might be done by the time you get back downstairs.
Monday night is all there is. You can’t watch anything Tuesday night—Tuesday night the kids have karate or Rex-kwon-do or whatever it is. Wednesday night is church night. And Thursday and Friday both are soccer—one night for each kid. Monday is your only night. Monday is the last night of a week crowded with self-extinguishing demands when you have 20 consecutive minutes of free time. And rebooting this router is going to take at least five of those minutes. Five grains of bright precious sand, trickling out of the hourglass to be swallowed by a yawning abyss. Five more minutes added onto the already-unknowable count of minutes across the years you’ve spent standing in the dark, hearing nothing but your own breath whistling in and out and your own blood rushing in your ears, waiting for those damn LEDs to start blinking. So many minutes.
"Netflix is not available," says the screen, unfeeling, uncaring. You want to smash the tablet, the router, the whole house—you want to burn it down, burn all of it down. Burn everything—burn Netflix, burn the Internet, burn down the entire scaffolding that holds up your life. Your mind flashes to a trim and fit vision of yourself dressed in animal skins, long hair held back by a leather thong, squatting by a small fire beneath a vast open sky of infinite stars that wheel madly overhead. A wolf howls somewhere miles away and you smile into the darkness, knowing that in the morning you will rise from a deep, restorative sleep to hunt and taking pleasure in life being no more complicated than that.
Your spouse drops a dish on the counter with a CLACK and the vision shatters. Netflix is not available. You stand, hearing your knees crack wearily like pistol shots, and go into the kitchen for a glass of water, then climb the steps and reboot the damned router.
But imagine this…
That’s what could happen. But imagine, dear reader, a different scenario—a scenario where you’d paired your $49.99 bargain basement garbage router with the $59.99 ResetPlug. You might still be trapped in a life of quiet suburban desperation, the only bright spot of which is streaming episodes of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, but at least with the ResetPlug you wouldn’t have to reboot the router yourself.
Netflix is not available.
The ResetPlug is a simple little gadget that automates the process of power cycling your combo SOHO NAT router/wireless AP. You plug your router into it and join it to your Wi-Fi network, and it watchdogs your connection. When it can’t reach the Internet, it cuts power to the router and re-applies it. It does the same thing that you’d do, fumbling under the bed for the plug, except it does it better (and, presumably, without waking up your kid).
On one hand, this is kind of a neat idea. Having to grapple with a locked-up, unresponsive wireless access point is a relatively common problem, especially if your router/AP is an older model and still runs factory firmware. Hit it with too many connections or even just let it idle for long enough and something somewhere in its guts will throw an exception and the system hangs. You can troubleshoot it, you can try to figure out what you might be doing to trigger the problem, or you can just yank the power cord out and plug it back in. Nine times out of ten that fixes the problem anyway—so why not have a gadget that automates that process?
Begging the question
On the other hand, this gadget costs $60. Sixty. Damn. Dollars. $60 for what’s effectively a hack to work around a problem that comes from settling for cheap, broke-ass equipment in the first place. This device is the very definition of the phrase "penny wise, pound foolish." Why on God’s green Earth would any human being with an ounce of common sense think that spending sixty damn dollars on an automatic power cycling doodad is a wise use of money?
NETFLIX IS NOT AVAILABLE.
Why would you do this to yourself? This isn’t the way out. This thing won’t save you. This is a band-aid over a broken bone. Don’t use a band-aid—fix the broken bone. That $50 cut-rate Wi-Fi router you got on clearance at OfficeMax? Throw that away. That blue Linksys you’ve had since 2002 that only does 802.11a and 802.11b and once got so hot that the plastic warped and now it won’t stack properly? Throw that away. That garbage combo router/Wi-Fi AP your cable company charges you $10 a month to rent?… okay, don’t throw that away, because you’d be entering a world of pain when the cable company asks for it back, but do buy something else.
You don’t need an expensive multi-AP setup to escape from router reboot hell. You don’t even need a particularly expensive all-in-one device—you could spend $200 on an Apple Airport Extreme or Netgear Nighthawk if that tickles your fancy, but for about $100 there are some great choices that won’t require you to pull the power cord out every other night.
Imagine: instead of spending $50 on a crap router and then $60 on a hack to reboot it automatically when it does what crap routers do, you could spend $100 on a non-crap router and never have to reboot it in the first place.
Gliding over all
But now, let’s go back to you. You’re in your chair. Your spouse is finishing in the kitchen. The kids are asleep. Five bars of Wi-Fi signal on your tablet. Your finger hovers over the Netflix app. There’s no doubt it’s going to work. You don’t even remember what your Wi-Fi router looks like—you rarely even think about it, about the miracle of technology that somehow beams so many megabits per second of data through the air of your home, feeding your electronic devices, keeping connected to all the bits of machinery that run your life. And why would you think of your Wi-Fi router? It just works. It’s always just worked. It wasn’t the cheapest one on the shelf—there was some whitebox special next to it for $49.99—but spending the extra money has been worth it.
You tap Netflix. It loads instantly.
"…but feeeemales are strong as hell…"
Tuesday morning is a million miles away. Maybe everything’s going to be okay after all.
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