Voip Blog
Adventures in voip installation
Friday, August 11, 2006
No one would ever accuse my mom of being technologically adept. In fact, it's only in the last year and a half that she figured out how to use the dreaded e-mail. Naturally, I thought this would make her the perfect person to set up my voip. Heh. Heh. Heh. No. Seriously. She set up my voip.
And it works. A few days after I got this confirmation e-mail, what should appear on my doorstep but a shiny new package from voip.com??!!?? Oh the anticipation...and since my mom is visiting, we opened it up together. "What is all this stuff?" she asked. "My new voip internet phone adapter, " I replied. Blank stare and dead silence ensue.
After I gave her the thumbnail version of what voip is, she seemed to think it was pretty nifty. Until I told her she would be the one setting it up. Whereupon hyperventilation commenced in earnest. But I talked her down off the ledge and convinced her that really, it couldn't be that hard because, look...there are pictures all over the instructions. What could possibly go wrong?
She took everything out of the box and successfully matched each item to the graphic in the instruction booklet. Then she read the part that helps you figure out if you already have a router or not. "You must already have a router, "she said. Blank stare and dead silence ensue. Because I'm 100% sure she has no idea what a router is. Also, because she was right.
We flipped over to the sixth page and then she got busy plugging the Ethernet cable into the Linksys router and then unplugging the wireless router from the cable modem so she could hook the Linksys to the cable modem and then the wireless back to the Linksys and it doesn't really matter if you've lost the thread of what went where because she pretty much knew what she was doing, which is all that counts. I just stood back and watched. After everything was powered up she lifted the phone handset to check for a dial tone. "I think I killed it," she said.
Sure enough, not only was there no dial tone, but the internet was down as well. "I think we need to go to the troubleshooting page," she added. And again, I just kind of stood there and maybe drooled a little because, really, there's no wrapping my head around the part where my mom is going to willingly troubleshoot this problem.
But she did and then we shut everything down for 5 minutes, before starting the equipment up again in this very specific order: modem, existing router, Linksys router, computer. And folks, OMG...it worked. I'm just gonna say it again: my mom set up my voip.
And the crowd goes wild.
