Command central gets a makeover

I normally communicate about cat rescue using a economy laptop I purchased earlier this year. But all the "guts" of my rescue and paying-job communication lives upstairs on an old Dell tower CPU that I inherited when the company I work for was first sold to a larger corporation. They sent us new laptops at that time, and no one wanted to old stuff, so it became disenfranchised, and therefore our own. My
Dell therefore became my communication drone.

Every now and then I go up there to dust everything off. Modem, router, phone base, cell booster, monitor, etc. You'd think that would be enough right?

Oh, no. Because I have cats!

Every now and then...no wireless. Why? A cat has stepped on the "off" button on the battery backup.

Now and then, I hear a crash upstairs. A cat has knocked down one of my garage-sale speakers. I go back up and prop things up again. Wires get tangled.

A cat chews through the skinny cord on the router. No wireless. Buy new router. New router wire goes over old wires. Wires get more tangled.

Cat knocks down power surge protector. I pick it up and cram it back behind the CPU to make it more secure. Wires become more tangled.

You get the drift.

It got so I hated to even look at it. I had small panic attacks anytime I walked up the stairs.

If this looks not-so-bad to you, it's because I was too embarrassed to show you the worst.
I used to have a very nice monitor (expensive! flatscreen!) but after 6 years of hard use it slowly began to flicker to the point I could no longer tolerate it. A few months ago I dragged out my old huge warhorse of a monitor that weighs about half as much as I do, and I've tried to use that instead. However the cats like lying on it and looking out the window so, you guessed it, I experience even more cat-related outages.

I finally decided all these little stressful things had to go, one by one. So yesterday I went on an economy shopping trip looking for a cheap, thin, flat-screen monitor (Acer, $79, Staples, SCORE!) and some clearance items to help protect my equipment and wires. I'll let you know in 60 days whether I was successful or not.

As you can see, Davis is already looking for ways to seek and destroy even as I clean up (Yes, I still need to finish painting back there).

You know how they tell you to plug in first A, then B, then C, etc? The heck with it. I got so frustrated I just turned everything off, unplugged it all, swore at the wires as I attempted to get them in some sort of order, plugged them all back in, and turned everything back on.

And here I am. Still. Knock on wood.