When Lightning Strikes Twice

Then maybe you will learn a lesson or two?

A couple of weeks ago, during a lightning storm, our desktop popped and blue light shot out of it... I guess we weren't sure that it was lightning... but odds are it probably was. That was a bummer! We're still hoping to recover the hard drive! 'Cause tons of pics that were never backed up...

So I think something also happened to our wireless router during that storm, it got slow as heck after that... but I think we never quite equated it to the storm... So last Saturday we went and got a new wireless router...

Two days later? Big lightning storm. Huge hit somewhere very close to the house. Woke us all up at 3am, power outage and everything.

In the morning, I couldn't get online. So I started troubleshooting the dsl/wireless router stuff. The wireless router was off, so I hit the power button and had to keep turning it on like 5 or more times before it came on and stayed on! Should have figured something was up at that point. But I continued all the troubleshooting stuff... to no avail...

Then around 10am realized that the cordless phones weren't working... didn't try the land line. If I would have I would have found it working... Anyway, since I wasn't smart enough to check the land line, I had to drive about 20miles to get a cell signal to call the phone company. Of course they said that everything was good on their end and they would send someone out.

Long story short, yes a lightning strike zapped our cordless phones, dsl modem, and our brand new wireless router!!!

When the phone guy went to check the cordless phone base, he touched the line and it fell apart!! There was a huge scorch mark on the phone book the base was sitting on!! And all the internet filter things that hook up to the phone line were fried. We are sooo lucky we only lost our electronic stuff. While expensive, it's all replaceable.

When we got home with our new cordless phones, first thing I did? Remove all the paper before placing the base on the table...