Solutions

Panic! Friday night I couldn't connect to the internet. Damn, how can that be? Was it the because of the electricity blackout that had put 50,000 households in The Hague back in the Middle Ages for an hour that morning, which immediately refueled the debate on liberalization of the energy market? No chatting with my girl overseas; instead as second best: wine and cheese. Experiment: could enough wine improve one's sleep? Conclusion: hard to say. Surprising data, however: bizarre dreams featuring people I had met recently. Next morning another finding: wine and dreams don't bring back broadband connections. A sense of total isolation, it made me nervous. So I went to the big market (Haagse Markt), for some contacts, and for heaps of fruits and vegetables. I got kind of a holiday feeling there. Really, I couldn't help it, with so many cultures crowding around. Sweet summer fruits piled up everywhere. Why do they get ripe all at once? Strawberries and cherries, plums and peaches, melons and apricots, for a penny I could fill up a truck. I don't have a truck, and I only have one stomach, I just can't process it all. First, I'd be looking at a full basket, squeezing the plums every day, caressing the peaches, checking the progress of the ripening. Then, when the time is right, it's like with blossom trees: an explosion of ripe fruits, most of which risks a quick return into the cycle. The strawberries were nice and sweet, though, ready to eat. However, vitamin shortage was not the problem: still no internet. Close inspection of the modem revealed that it had to be somewhere downstream. Lights in the hub looked irresolute. Reshuffling some of the cables and voilà, it worked! On Friday I had received a letter from the States. "We selected someone else for the position of Solutions Fellow." Had they just known how I solved this connectivity thing....