My dad's office had a very expensive, very fast For the time, of course.Ĭommercial internet connection. Remember how my dad's company had extensive experience with networking solutions? Well, we had a fancy networking setup at home too - and it had worked flawlessly for the best part of 10 years! Some context on our home networking setup is in order. ' Magical thinking be damned! Am I an engineer or what?' I told myself. Or, I could break out of that downward spiral and get to the bottom of what was going on. I could keep going through the stages of grief: I could sulk and plan my calls with my girlfriend around the weather forecast.

The rain stops, and within 15 minutes the internet connection is unusable again.Īs much as I hated to admit it, the evidence was solid.

The rain starts, and not even a few minutes later the internet connection is crisp and fast.

Thankfully, the weather stayed grey and murky for the next few days. I was ready to do just about anything to get more rain.

The internet connection went back to being unusable. Then, 15 minutes or so after the rain stopped, the packet loss rate shot back up to 90%+. The rain held up for about an hour, and so did the internet connection. I couldn't believe my eyes! I was ready for the connection to die at any second, so I opened a million tabs at once - as if I don't normally do that anyway. Like a miracle, within 5 minutes of the rain starting, the packet loss rate was down to 0%! I couldn't just use my phone's data plan to work around the problem, like one might do today in a similar situation. I had just started dating someone a few months prior, and she was currently on the other side of the planet! How was I to explain that I couldn't stay in touch because it wasn't raining? Mobile data at the time was exorbitantly expensive, so much so that I didn't have a data plan at all for my cell service at home. Nothing loads when you have a 98% packet loss rate! The network may as well have been dead. The internet connection was still up, but only in the most annoying 'technically accurate' sense. Pinging any website had a 98% packet loss rate. I pulled open my laptop and started poking at the network. Two weeks without reliable internet? I started a speed-run through the stages of grief. If anything, rain makes wireless signal quality worse, not better. 'It started a couple of weeks ago, and I haven't had a chance to look into it yet.' 'The Wi-Fi only works while it's raining,' he repeated patiently. He is the last person on Earth who would say a 'magical thinking' phrase like that. Through the company he started, he had designed and deployed all sorts of complex network systems at institutions across the country - everything from gigabit Ethernet for an office building, to inter-city connections over line-of-sight microwave links.

My dad is an engineer who had already been tinkering with networking gear longer than I'd been alive. I hadn't been back home in almost a full year, because home and school were on different continents. I had come back home to spend a couple of weeks with my parents before the fall semester kicked off. Let's back up a few steps, so we're all on the same page about the utter ridiculousness of this situation.Īt the time, I was still a college student - this was over 10 years ago. 'The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining.' That's what my dad said when I asked what was wrong with our home internet connection. Please enjoy this true story, and rest assured that the tech content will be back soon! Happy April 1st! This post is part of April Cools Club: an April 1st effort to publish genuine essays on unexpected topics.

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