Bull ate the cable

So, one evening my internet stops working, after waiting for an hour I call my ISP. Some background information, I live in a small village in the city of Delhi and my ISP is a local guy.

When my phone is answered, the internet guy asks for my location and say to me “Quickly bring 2 rotis by the secondary gate of the village.” I’m confused and ask for more details, he again repeats the same, I repeat the question and finally he replies, “A bull ate the main line cable and is sitting below it, we need to feed it the rotis so we can work, while it is eating.”.

So, now it is funny to me, so me and my mother take a lathi (A long heavy stick) and are on our way to deal with the bull. When we reach the crime scene, it turns out, it’s a small cow which is tied to the ground and our courageous ISP workers fear it and refuse to work on the cable till the cow isn’t moved.

Now, I don’t know whose cow it is, so I ask my grandfather, and he asks someone, and then some other person comes and finally the cow is moved and the cable is joined once more.

Praying to god for no calls

In 2008, my home had an old landline connection from MTNL. My parents deciding the internet was a huge source of knowledge and necessary for me and my brother’s education, upgraded it to a dial-up connection, the only one in the village, with amazing speeds of 256 Kb/s.

Now, during that time the landline was still heavily used and as soon as a phone call was picked up, our internet died. Now, with such amazing speeds, there was little we could achieve without slowly downloading things.

So now, when downloading files the size of 10-50MB (YouTube videos/ Small games), Me and my brother would Stand guard around the telephone, trying to stop anyone in the home from using the phone while our file downloaded. We prayed to GOD, that please there be no calls and please our file be successfully downloaded.

One time we had a huge fight with our mother as she kept trying to use the landline as her phone was not working that day. We even picked up the phone a few times and told the callers to call tomorrow, just let us use the computer.

Over time, this slowly died down, as me and my brother discovered a superpower of just removing the telephones cable. We were punished for this a few times, as a few important calls were missed due to this.

This telephone fight finally came to an end when we found the existence of torrenting. This allowed us to download huge files (> 100MB) slowly, throughout the day.