A Spot of Bother for the Web-less Blogger

It may seem ridiculous, but I am a blogger with no internet. My house sits in a complete black-spot (see very scientific government diagram), and no amount of standing out on the road with my laptop in the middle of the night is enough to get more than one teeny little bar of service. And that’s why all this happened…

Diagram A: a diagram.

About a month ago, while browsing Google & definitely not procrastinating, I discovered a competition offering publication as the prize. Anyone familiar with that epically tense moment as one quickly checks the submission dates to ensure the competition isn’t long in the past will understand my relief when I saw there was a month to go.

And you’ll understand why that relief kicked me in the guts when I saw I needed a one page synopsis.

Despite my apprehensions, I told the word count gods to bring it and started editing my existing two page synopsis with the precision and delicacy of a stamp-collecting brain surgeon. The day before the contest ended I visited the library to check the entry requirements and, to my horror, found conflicting information regarding the closing time (yeah, I’ll bet you’ll understand that feeling too). If I took the earliest mentioned date as true, it meant I no longer had a whole day of last minutes to play with. I had to be finished that night.

With my lunch break over I emailed myself the entry form, rushed back to work, minimised my web browser so my account manager wouldn’t see and opened the email. I hit print, snuck to the printer, and received only the first few lines, thanks to Google docs being terrible and me not having my browser big enough to see it. When I returned to my desk, my account manager was waiting. I couldn’t escape until home time, so when I did I decided to duck back to the library. That’s when the fiancé called to say dinner at his parents’ place. In other words, come spend ‘the-evening-when-I-should-be-fixing-my-entry’ sitting around watching television instead. My only consolation? Unlimited internet.

That is, until it crashed exactly one minute after I arrived.

I spent the rest of the night acting like I wasn’t going silently crazy. The minute it was socially acceptable to leave, I packed up my laptop and their wireless internet dongle and drove into the city to the nearest sports field car park. Sure it was the middle of the night and I kept expecting drug dealers to come knocking at my windscreen wanting their deliveries, but I was confident I could defend myself, (namely because my laptop had started acting up and I was ready to murder the next person who even looked at me the wrong way). Finally, though, I managed to download the entry form and drove home to print it.

Only to discover that we had no ink.

And then to notice, on the miniscule terms and conditions staring back from my laptop screen, that the proper submission date wasn’t until the next day after all.

So if you know how this feels, please feel free to share my story. Because if you can’t laugh about these things, what else can you do? (And don’t say write a lame blog post about it because I am waaaaay ahead of you).

J