Technology Brings The Family Closer

There's nothing like a good bit of technology to bring the family closer together. No, I'm not talking about Skype, Instant Messaging or YouTube videos. After what I've had to put up with for the last week I'm not talking about any of that. Rather, the opposite. Lack of technology bringing the family closer together.

What happened was that we reached our download limit with our ISP on the 24th day of the month and I was notified of that fact by email from our ISP. Usually they send an email stating that we've reached 80% of our downloads first but this didn't happen. That meant the rest of the month was shaped at 64kb during peak times. Off-peak times are 2am to 8am so not a lot happens usually during off-peak. Well, we became a family of early risers, which coincided with school holidays, so that everyone could make use of the Net. I tell you, 64kbps is woeful and the Internet becomes pretty much unusable. It was difficult to read news articles and you can forget about playing Facebook games. Talk about frustrating. At the end of the month I received an email stating that I'd reached 80% of downloads so fired an email in return to the ISP saying that it was arse-about-face. They have apologised and brought to my attention that I could switch to a much better, and cheaper, plan if I wanted to. They'll also backdate my invoice should I wish to take up the offer.

Evenings were spent doing the family thing. Playing games, talking, reading books and watching movies. A fair amount of gardening was done too. Gosh, it's been a while since we've actually interacted like that. And now everyone is happy to be a morning person (early riser). It's a bit of a standing joke in our household as my wife is certainly not a morning person. She enjoys a sleep in.

Funny thing with the video from the video shop. My missus took the DVDs back that I'd borrowed for my son. That afternoon there was a phone call to say that we'd returned the cover for one of the DVDs but not the actual DVD. I ended getting to watch it, Asterix and the Big Fight, and it was disappointing. The book was much better than the screenplay adaptation. At least when I took the DVD back to the shop that night I didn't forget to rewind it. Now that's real technology.