I arrived in Memphis yesterday at 1:30 pm. It took me two, two and half hours to find and inspect four tourist spots — Graceland, the Lorraine Motel (i.e., the site of Martin Luther King‘s murder on April 4, 1968), Beale Street and Sun Records. I left Memphis at 4 pm, driving south on 55. I arrived in Oxford around 5:30 pm and checked into the Oxford Downtown Inn, courtesy of the Oxford Film Festival. And then the wireless issues began.
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Forced to file from the lobby of the Oxford Downtown Inn. Taken at 5:40 am this morning.
It’s now just before 6 am and the issues haven’t stopped, and I’ve decided to cut bait as a result. That’s right — I’m outta here, flying back to NYC. Or maybe I’ll drive south a bit and cruise around, find an adventure, something. Any place with decent wifi I call home.
The hotel doesn’t offer wireless in the rooms, providing instead a late-20th-Century ethernet cable connection for internet access. Except the cable is only eight inches long — the only time in my life that I’ve ever seen or heard of a connection cable this short — and the connection it delivers is erratic and/or not strong enough, the result being that transferring jpegs to my server via FTP software stopped working almost immediately. I resorted to my AT&T Air Card, which worked for a while last night but stopped working this morning for some reason. It’s now 5:40 am and my only working connection right now (albeit a “very low” one) is the wireless that the hotel offers in the lobby only.
I can’t do this. I won’t do this. This is not 1997, and if a regional film festival is unable to provide easy, high-speed wifi to its journalist guests then no offense but it just shouldn’t invite them down in the first place. I mean, c’mon.
Bless Oxford, Mississippi in all other respects. It’s a soothing, pleasingly upscale, lively, obviously highly cultured college town with a real-deal 19th Century atmosphere. And the Oxford Film Festival has been, for me, a charmer in every respect except for the ridiculous internet situation. If I can’t post easily and swiftly, there’s really no point in being here.
So I’m packing my bags and heading back to Memphis this morning. I really don’t have time for this foolishness. I’m not there to sip moonshine and read Faulkner — I’m here to work, and it’s just too much work, too frustrating and too inconvenient to accomplish this goal.
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