For those of you that don’t know, your router (sometimes correctly and sometimes incorrectly also referred to as a “modem”) is your devices’ gateway to the internet. Now, normally, the first “stop” (called “hop”, but it rhymes, so that’s okay) before your internet goes out into the world wide web to fetch whatever you where looking for 🤐 is your ISP (the company to which you pay money in order to “have internet”). Some people, like myself, don’t want my ISP to know what I’m doing on the world wide web, because I’m worried I’ll give them a heart attack 🤞 So in order to spare them that suffering, I let my router “scramble” all the information going out from and coming in to my home. I also pay money to another company that “de-scrambles” the information, so that it can actually interact with the world wide web (look for images, play video streams, chat, whathaveyou). These companies, often referred to as VPNs, often let you choose which one of their computers (called “servers”) you send your scrambled information to, because sometimes you want it to appear as though you were in a different place than you actually are. Sometimes the speed of “your internet” is important, in which case you want to choose one of their computers that are closest to your actual location. And once you have chosen, you very often can be done with it and never touch it again. Which is what I did. And it worked flawlessly for FIVE YEARS.

Until today.

I come home work, connect to my WiFi and I have no internet. I troubleshoot like crazy. I go through my physical connections (cables, AC/DC power adapters, the internet cable plugs in the walls, etc), the interconnection between my various devices (phone to router, computer to router, etc), the software settings within the router… I even try downgrading the operating system of the router and my access points. God knows how long I spent doing this.

Then it hit me: let’s check if my VPN has announced anything on their blog! Maybe that specific computer of theirs to which I’m sending my internet is out of order? And that was exactly it. I simply chose another computer of theirs and badabing badabom.

🫠