SOLTuesday: Printer Update

Last week I reported that I was breaking through my internal doldrums and had replaced the printer that no longer worked. Over the weekend I unpacked the new printer, plugged it in, and started to set it up. But it was stuck at the “connect to wi-fi” step. I have two networks, a primary one and a guest one, and none of the passwords I had written down worked. Everything failed.

                  Friday, Saturday, and Sunday I kept trying. This was made more complicated because I have two Airporters (routers), one to extend my network to all corners of my apartment. After one of my failed attempts, the primary network no longer appeared in the list of available networks, and the extender Airport has a flashing yellow light. Once the primary network disappeared, one of my laptops lost its Internet connection and had to be logged in to the guest network. My phone initially was still attached to the primary network, but then I had to log it on to the guest network.

                  Sunday night I spoke with my brother, the computer wiz, but he doesn’t even use Airports anymore. And before I went to bed, I noticed that the Airport Utility no longer found any wireless devices, even though I was still connected to the Internet through the guest network. I was beginning to feel like I had entered the Twilight Zone.

                  Yesterday afternoon I called Apple Support and spent almost an hour with a technical assistant. First he had me reset the primary Airport (this is the high-tech method of poking at an indentation with a paperclip). Finally, it showed up in the Utility, and we went through the steps of setting up the Airport, with me explaining to him what had gone wrong in the past, and him explaining things that had confused me, like, Ethernet being the connection—this referred to the Airport’s cable connection to the cable modem. Ahhhh.

                  Now it all worked, the “new” password was successfully updated. Then I asked Ronnie whether he could stay on the line with me while I set up the printer. Really, I asked, if the printer doesn’t accept this wifi connection, who should I call: Epson or Apple? Who’s responsible? He laughed at that, and said, sure, since he’d been on the phone with me this long, he could stay a bit longer.

                  So he walked me through each step, and this time, the wifi connection was successful. And then the extender Airport showed up in the Airport Utility, and later I noticed that its light had turned green, with me not having to do anything. And all the devices are now connected via the primary network, not the guest network anymore. They just did it by themselves. Thank you, thank you, thank you. 

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