Technology woes: laptop, internet, email, phone

Laptop: Battery dies approximately 2 minutes and 16 seconds after becoming unplugged. No audible, colorful or pop up warnings that the unpluggage has happened. Miles does it discretely.

Internet: The icon says its working, but pages cannot load approximately 50% of the time. David says this is a server problem and has increased the percentage of working internet time to 55% by pulling the server box out from its "decorative" position next to my lamp and vase to the center of my nightstand - cords and flashing lights prominently displayed. This is lovely.

Email: Gmail. My link to civilization when I have nothing to actually talk about rendering the cell phone useless except as a camera. The obscessive compulsive program randomly has the desire to reload itself and believes it reassuring to the user to give a countdown such as "reconnecting in 78 seconds, 77 seconds....2 seconds, 1 second....reconnecting in 78 seconds...." Though this can go on for upwards of 78 minutes, it refuses to acknowledge that it often takes many cycles of the proposed seconds to successfully reload which would graciously allow the user to do more productive things instead of standing by (which of course they cannot do otherwise.) Upon finally finding itself it celebrates with the ever increasingly annoying message "and...we're back!" like it just accomplished a great feat.

Phone: Home phone that is. First off the caller ID usually reads "insufficient data," but this is not consistent. It has many different captions for a single calling number and apparently uses a shuffle function to decide which one to apply to a specific call. Second, though it is used infrequently, a portion of the time it says "I'm sorry, you're not connected to the network...try again!" (Or something to that effect.) Perhaps the server box needs to stand on a pedestal for this to remedy.