Crappy Wi-Fi can ruin one’s day, whether it’s disrupting a show you’re watching, an online game or important work calls.
Here are some frustrating instances you may relate to when the WiFi just isn’t doing its job:
Streaming wars at home
My 72-year-old dad spends a good part of his day slouching on the couch, relying on the home WiFi to stream everything from Netflix, HBO Go, Disney+, and YouTube.
But sometimes, catching a show isn’t as smooth as he hopes it would be.
Often I see him fiercely clicking the buttons of the remote, growing impatient when his show isn’t loading.
“Ugh,” he exclaims as the screen is stuck, with the loading icon swirling round and round.
After a couple of minutes of this, he drags himself towards the internet router, switches the main power off, counts to 10 and then switches it back on again hoping that it will miraculously fix the problem.
Normally it doesn’t.
At the same time, my mum attempts to hold a meeting online: “Sorry X, could you repeat yourself? You were cut off.”
And would immediately proceed to mute her laptop’s mic and shout at the top of her lungs:
“Can someone fix the WiFi?
Why always like that?”
99 per cent of the time, everyone else’s internet connection is working fine, so my brother and I who are usually in our rooms tend to shout back: “It’s okay for me.”
“Well it’s not fine for me,” she replied.
“Can you get it fixed?” my mum will ask my dad from behind a furrowed brow.
My dad responds: “You think so easy is it ah?”
Then comes more trouble. My grandma picks up her phone to load a YouTube video her friends sent over in a chat group and it just lags. She starts nagging at my dad and adds to the frustration.
In summary, a bad WiFi day may cause some tension at home.
Disconnected in Dota
Good WiFi is crucial to gaming fanatics.
My gamer friend fumed as he recalled a “terrible” time when the internet failed him in the middle of a Dota game.
When the video game lags, his friends playing online with him couldn’t see his avatar moving around.
“You look like you’re just staring into the distance,” he told me about how it has the effect of making one’s character look incredibly stupid in the game.
He’ll know that the game is doomed when his latency - the delay in response after pressing a button on his control - is high at about 500 milliseconds, he said.
“You’re doing well for your team then it lags and ruins a fight and the entire game.”
More often than not, his parents will be awakened by worrying yells of frustration coming from his room late at night.
“It doesn’t affect me only, but it also affects others in the game as well,” he added in a very serious, yet disheartened tone.
It must be frustrating to lose a game when it's not even your fault.
Bye-bye concert tickets
Concerts are back in full swing with fans waiting in eager anticipation for the start of online sales so they can snag the best tickets to watch their idol or band perform.
“(I) was standing by for like 10 minutes before,” a Billie Eilish fan shared her experience about trying to get tickets to the pop star's concert.
Refreshing the page over and over, the “BUY TICKET” button came up and she clicked on it immediately but was handed the 4,000th place in the queue.
As she waited in the virtual line, her WiFi failed on her and the site wouldn’t load.
“So I had to reload but used 5G on my phone instead. I managed to go through but now I was on like 26,000th.”
Thankfully she managed to get a seat but it was far away from the stage.
If her internet was fine, she might have been able to actually see Eilish, rather than through the concert's big screens which she could have caught at home.
Annoying isn’t it?
If you made it this far down the article, you probably can relate to at least some of these frustrating situations with sharing your Broadband at home — which also means it's probably time for an upgrade.
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This sponsored piece by StarHub convinced the writer to add “no bad WiFi days” to her 2023 list of goals.
Top images courtesy of Alfie Kwa.