Out of order

I’m writing you this when it happened but will not be able to post it before tomorrow morning because my internet connection, or to be precise: my phone line, got disconnected just a few minutes ago and this moment of disconnection was so unbelievably bad timed because tonight would have been my first race with the GPRT in a very long time. Somehow it seems it just wasn’t meant to be.

Tonight would have been my great re-entree in ‘the racing scene’ which sounds awesome but is actually nothing more than me racing online with the GPRT again, for the first time since a (too) long absence. As you might remember, hardware problems had caused my gaming PC to die out on me and although it hasn’t been fixed yet, I did manage to get my previous machine setup so it can run rFactor, our most used sim. It now runs in such a way that I can race online with the guys once again which is all that I need for now. I want to race again. Period.

At first I thought it was a rFactor server hiccup, because those do happen from time to time, and when I switched my screen to the server’s it showed that everybody but me had disconnected from it so I restarted the server to let everyone reconnect once again. But when the server had restarted nobody joined it for a few minutes which is odd. Normally after a restart everyone is waiting for the server to come online and join in directly, but tonight nobody did.

After waiting a few minutes more I turned to our forum to see if there were any problems and then the scale of the problem became a little bit clearer to me: I lost my internet connection. No wonder nobody could join, the server wasn’t even visible online. Duh! So I cursed at the bad timing, reset the modem and waited until the ADSL connection kicked in, which is usually after a few seconds. Again though, tonight was an exception. The modem came back online as usual but no ADSL connection could be made.

To determine where the problem was coming from I tried the phone next and that’s when I found out that there was no dial tone. No dial tone meant no phone line, which in terms meant ADSL couldn’t work either. Damn! I called the service line on my mobile phone and the ever friendly tape I got told me that there was a ‘problem with the network in my region’ and that it would take until tomorrow morning seven o clock to get it fixed. Right. That’s it then.

Next I phoned Bas to explain the situation and why the server had gone and then called dad to tell him that he possibly wouldn’t have internet tomorrow. He asked me if I remembered that there had been a notice about some maintenance work being done this Monday … Obviously, I didn’t. Well, so much for returning to the track. It is simply not going to happen tonight, that’s for sure. So I’m just going to watch a movie now and hope that tomorrow everything is restored to normal.

Have a nice evening all.