Well, we finally have broadband, and miracle of miracles I got it to work first time, although the cabling is kind of ad hoc at the moment and involves extension cables and balancing the router on a pile of...well, I'm not certain what's in that pile. Some books, certainly. Some letters from Barclaycard (many of them opened)... Anyway. Things might get a little less simple when I finally get back into the Little Room With All The Boxes, sometime around Christmas, but we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.
Anyway. I didn't really want broadband. Dialup was fine for my purposes; I don't download music or video or impossibly big files, and having the BBC homepage come up almost instantly wasn't foremost in my list of improvements to my life. But BT decided to scrap the payment plan which gave us free internet access after six o'clock and at weekends, so we wound up getting broadband. And all the fancy terminology that entails. Router: a little black box with lights on the front and wires coming out of the back. Microfilter: a little beige box you have to plug some stuff into. I mean, really.
Anyway, it is quick. It's not the eight mps we were promised, but it does average out around two and a half, which is way quick enough for me. I receive email before I realise I've got it, which is spooky after years of watching it arrive message by message by message. Now it hits the inbox all at once, before I have time to blink.
And has broadband had any great effect on me? The most wonderful thing I've found is that I can now listen to The News Quiz and old editions of I'm Sorry I haven't A Clue, where before they were so often interrupted by downloads that they were unlistenable.
So we have broadband and the only change in my internet usage is that I'm now using it to listen to the radio.
I don't know what the moral of this story is, but I have a sneaking suspicion that I'm really not as tech-savvy as I'd like to think.