Application to Retain Family Wifi Diplomacy
A short work of microfiction in which the household's most technically capable member explains, with diminishing patience, that resetting the router will not help, and is ignored.
The problem had been described to him in three separate conversations before he was asked to fix it.
"The wifi is slow," his mother had said, in the first conversation.
"The wifi keeps dropping," his father had said, in the second, which may have been a different problem or may have been the same problem described by someone who had not witnessed the first conversation.
"Something is wrong with the internet," his sister had said, in the third, which was broad enough to encompass either of the previous descriptions or something new.
He asked several questions. Which device? Which room? Had it been slow only today or for some time? The answers were: any device, any room, and it had been slow for a while but it was really slow today, or possibly it just seemed slow today because they were trying to use it for something that required it to be fast.
He went to the router.
The router was behind a decorative basket. It had been behind the basket for two years. He had put it there initially because it needed to be in that corner for range reasons and no one wanted to look at it, and it had remained there through three firmware updates and one unexplained period of excellent performance that no one could reproduce.
He checked the lights. He opened a diagnostic on his phone. The signal was adequate. The problem, he determined in under four minutes, was that three people were simultaneously using a video platform, a cloud storage application, and something his sister described as "just a game" that was in fact consuming bandwidth at a rate he found notable.
He explained this.
His father said: "Can we reset it?"
"Resetting it will not help," he said. "The problem is how much bandwidth is being used, not the router's state."
His father said: "I feel like resetting it always helps."
He reset it.
They waited two minutes for it to come back online, during which no one could use any device, and which his mother spent describing a previous wifi problem that had been fixed by the router being reset, though he did not recognize the problem she was describing and suspected the timing had been coincidental.
The router came back. The signal was adequate, as it had been before.
His sister said the game was loading faster now.
He did not respond to this. He went back to what he had been doing. The router, behind the basket, blinked steadily in the dark, serving its function, which it had been serving the entire time.
Three weeks later, the connection seemed slow again, and he was asked whether it might help to reset the router. He said that resetting it would not help. Then he reset it, because that was how it went, and because occasionally, not for the reasons anyone believed, it seemed to help.