Tom’s Tuesday Tech Tip: Are You Seeing the Forest or Just Looking at the Trees?

Monday evening, while Vickie and I were slaving over our hot keyboards with our usual single-minded focus, I suddenly got bumped offline. Just as I’d advise any Certified Legal Nurse Consultant, the first thing I did was close my web browser, then reopen it and try to reconnect. That didn’t work. Next, I glanced over at Vickie and saw, to my absolute horror, that she was still connected to our corporate VPN, happily working away.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but this calls for one of Vickie’s favorite expressions, “I was about to get lost in the forest while looking for the trees.”

My lack of connectivity in the face of Vickie’s overwhelming connectivity convinced me that the issue was with my computer. I refreshed and renewed my ipconfig (and IP address) – still nothing. That convinced me that the issue was probably my network card. Shutting down the system in disgust, I vowed to get on it the next morning. Morning came around all too quickly and, after a cup of healthy green tea, I fairly flew into the office to boot my computer and get back online. No joy – still no connection for me – but Vickie’s was still connected and running fine.

I looked over my past Tech Tip on how to diagnose and fix connectivity issues and assumed that it wasn’t the Internet since Vickie was still online. Then I ran the onboard diagnostics on the network card – working fine. Next I shut the laptop down, crawled under the spare desk and plugged the laptop directly into the router (after stampeding the dust-bunnies) to see if it was a cable issue. Booted up and got… you guessed it, no Internet, so it was apparently not a cable issue. I tried my connection to the home wireless – strong signal, but no Internet. Then I rebooted the wireless access point and got a stronger signal, but still no Internet (should have been a clue but I missed it).

Panic set in. Was my network card bad? Was my motherboard going bad? Was I doomed to live life offline? No, it had to be my network card. I pulled out my trusty USB Verizon travel modem and connected to the Internet flawlessly (avoiding my wired and wireless network cards). I Googled and Binged the problem and found no solutions beyond what I had already tried. Next I completely uninstalled the network card and reinstalled it, downloaded updated drivers for the network card; re-removed, re-installed, re-rebooted; diagnostics showed everything to be working fine but then, you guessed it – still no Internet.

All this time, Vickie was still working merrily away (I won’t mention the gloating). Now I was desperate. The only thing left to do was to take the computer to the Institute and try it there to see if it was some gremlin in the home office system or determine whether our router had stopped handing out IP addresses. If the router had crumped and stopped issuing addresses, that would have kept me and the wireless offline.

But, my CLNC^® amigos, here’s the rub: to check the router meant rebooting it, which would refresh and renew Vickie’s ipconfig settings as well as my own; but if the router had gone bad, it would take her offline until I could get a new router. Not the smartest thing to do to my favorite, hardworking CEO.

I made Plan B: keep working with my Verizon card and then, after my local Radio Shack was open, reboot the router and replace it if necessary. Ten a.m. came and while Vickie was distracted by a conference call, I refreshed her ip addresses, and lo and behold, we were now all offline together! I quickly followed this Tech Tip and rebooted the router, refreshed both of our network connections and we were back online faster than you can say “Duh! What was he thinking?”

So here’s the lesson for any Certified Legal Nurse Consultants reading this Tech Tip: when your legal nurse consulting business comes to a halt because you can’t get on the Internet, don’t jump to conclusions. Instead, remember what a famous Texas attorney-client of Vickie’s once told her – “When you’re out on the Texas prairie and hear hoof beats – don’t go looking for giraffes.” The fact that Vick was online while I was offline got inside my head. I’d never encountered this before and it set me off on a giraffe hunt. The fact that the wireless access point didn’t have Internet access should have been a clue that the router had gone wonky. Like any smart CLNC^® consultant, I should have started with Occam’s Razor and tried the simplest solution first before moving onto more the more complex. My first step should have been to reboot the router. Instead, I started rebuilding my computer.

If one of your home computers gets knocked off the Internet while others are still connected, don’t panic, before you run out and buy a new computer (Plan C) or buy a new router (Plan D), simply reboot your old router. Like me, it just might have been losing its grip and all it needed was to be refreshed before it started working again. If that doesn’t cure the problem, then you can panic.

Keep on techin’,