Wire you sending me this?

Not for the first time, the joke was on me!

Not our kitten, but a cute one, huh?

An early wireless router

Now that our home is filled with PCs, smart phones and tablets, it seems propitious to go wireless.  So I ran around the house removing wires where I found them, and soon found that it's not enough just to yank out wires to go wireless. One needs a doodad called a wireless router. As I understand it, rather than being powered by the good people over at Baltimore Gas Electric (which must be their name now, since they insist on being called "BGE" rather than the sensible "BG & E"), these devices are self powered, and look like this (at right).

Well, just like the time that I thought a "psychopath" was a trail in the woods for the insane, I was wrong. A wireless router is much smaller than this, and requires no churning by the user. I found this out by calling the good people who provide me cable and internet service.  I called 'em and they said they'd send a wireless router right on over, and I was all set for installation, because I am fortunate enough to have a friend who knows how to set these things up who volunteered to help.

So I emailed him when the package was delivered by the good people over at UP & S.  I was so excited to live in this modern age when a little device that hardly weighed more than the box it came in could connect me to a world that showed me pictures of the entire Kardashian family! 

This is all that was in the box!

And then, curiosity getting the best of me, I decided to open the box to see up close this talisman of the electronic age.  And I found that they had sent me an empty box, reminiscent of earlier days in which box factories were set up to ship air from place to place.

I knew that today's doodads were light and also not heavy, but they are not invisible.  The lady on the phone over at the cable company, once she finished chortling over the image of me opening an empty box, expecting it to be packed with more than just air, said they would send a router for real, real soon.