"Connection Error"

Last Sunday I had what can only be described as a complete technology meltdown.

I'd set my Virgin Media V+ box to record the last Formula One race of the 2010 season while I was at work. The championship was gonna be decided and so to avoid hearing the result I went completely off grid, no Facebook, no Twitter, nothing.

I returned home and started watching the recording having successfully avoided any news about who'd won, one of my preferred drivers (anyone who isn't Fernando Alonso) was leading and things were going fine until lap 10 when... My V+ Box told me it was full up and hadn't recorded any further.

No problem I thought! I'll just catch it on the BBC iPlayer catchup service that you can access through my Virgin box. It wasn't there.

I decided to try using my PlayStation 3 to see if the BBC had made the feed available on the iPlayer app - once I'd signed in and done the obligatory software updates there it was, the 2010 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. I fast forwarded to lap ten and continued watching the race.

...Until lap 16.

I looked at my router and instead of the familiar little green light there was a flashing amber one instead. This meant, in laymans terms, that my broadband had just gone out. Cockit.


According to the instructions this means "Bad Times"

Maybe I could get iPlayer on my iPhone? After checking, apparently you need to be connected to a wifi network.

I racked my brains thinking of a way to watch the rest of the race without any kind of Internet connection and suddenly it struck me! My iPad! I moved to the one spot on my house where I get 3G reception (luckily its my bedroom, and not the toilet or something) and loaded up the site. After fifteen minutes of buffering I got one minute of footage. It wasn't working.

The worst part was that I couldn't do anything to pass the time while the broadband came back on - couldn't go online or watch tv incase I found out the result so I just sat there reading a copy of OK that was on the table in front of me.

In the end the broadband came back on at about 10pm and I watched the remaining three hours before bed but it really got me thinking about the reliance we have on technology to entertain us.

If the broadband had gone down on it's own then that would have been fine, if the V+ Box hadn't recorded the whole race then i'd still be able to watch online but when four separate pieces of technology fail at the same time (albeit three of them reliant on the Internet) it left me pretty screwed.

So what else did I learn? Next F1 season I'm digging out the Betamax.