Michael: Due to Circumstances...

Cows on a cow truck
Head to tail and tail to head
Must wonder what’s up?

Sunday, June 26, 2016

“Due to circumstances beyond our control,” should definitely be part of this region’s of Panama theme. It’s also neutral sounding enough to perhaps intrigue tourists.

Lightning, for example, what’dya going to do about it? The lightning that struck nearby a couple of days ago caused a power surge and split a cable in half on one of the main road transfer boxes. (The ‘transfer box’ I’m making up. I don’t know what it’s called, but transfer box sounds accurate and is better than calling it doohickey. But now that the net’s back up I can look it up. I won’t. But I am going to look up the derivation of the term ‘doohickey’).

The power surge then traveled along the phone line and entered our cottage  and continued to our splitter. There it had 5 choices; it could go up the line to our internet modem, it could go through our land phone line, it could do both; it could stop; or it could go back. However electricity works, it chose the modem and left the 15 year old General Electric phone our landlord loaned us alone. Go figure.

It also may have taken out our landlord’s rotor and computer. She’s got to take them in and have them looked at. She does have internet again, just no way to access it.

So two days so far this year without the net. That’s manageable. It didn’t come at the best of times with Kimme being in the states. In order to contact her I had to walk about 15 minutes to the internet café, but it’s a nice walk.

It’s odd that people use the expression, “shit happens” to reference unwanted occurrences. But shit doesn’t just happen. At least I hope not. It ought to be like clock work and seen as a sign of good health. A lightning strike on a transfer box; now that’s a more apt example of an uncommon and problematic event. How to work that into a pithy phrase like “shit happens” I’m not sure about. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s not in the lexicon around here.