Last night we watched the film Up In The Air. Lucky for us, it was well worth viewing. It spoke volumes of the verities of human emotional need, how much of our emotions are invested in how we conduct ourselves through our interpersonal attachments and in the workplace, an area of human endeavour which constitutes the major mature portion of an individual's life-purpose in the capacity of adequately fending for ourselves in a sometimes-hostile environment. Hostile, that is, to finding satisfaction in life.

And, of course, how an unexpected interruption in the flow of their lives can utterly disrupt the balance, leaving them bereft, unprotected from the blows of life's adversities. Our dependence on one another as human contacts of both deeply intimate and more casual reliance as part of the social fabric that communities and families and workplaces represent is set out in excellent detail, with outstanding theatrical performances.

Understudy: Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick) gets a lesson in corporate downsizing from Ryan Bingham

We don't usually watch films on week-day nights, reserving that to Saturdays. And this is a film that we had set aside, but needed to be returned to the public library, so we took that opportunity. We were shut out of the Internet, unaccountably. In the evenings my husband usually looks up old, mostly British serial productions, both dramas and crime types that appeal to him. While I in my turn spend the evening hours writing in my blogs.

We checked all of our plugs and their contacts, and nothing seemed amiss, yet the ability to log onto the Internet was consistently denied us. Reluctantly, because I rarely have satisfaction from it, I dialled the Bell Sympatico help line and struggled through the rigmarole of speaking to a technician. Offshore, of course. We both felt that the connection lapse hadn't emanated from our immediate location, but was a failure of Bell Sympatico, and had expected to be informed that this was the case before even speaking to a technician.

That didn't happen. Instead, the technician patiently drew me through a series of instructions, basically repeating what we had already done on our own, to no avail. He concluded, through his expertise, that we needed to replace the power supply cord for the ethernet modem; not enough energy was being provided for the modem to operate, he explained. The struggle to understand his suggestions and conclusions compounded by his Indian-accented English; good and precise, but accented nonetheless, comprising an auditory challenge.

And that, my friend, was that. No Internet capacity for us, that evening. I could have done my composing offline and then transferred the results once able to retain Internet capacity, but there's just something about being online that propels me into effortless writing activity.

At midnight, however, after viewing the film and looking over at the modem, there it was, displaying full capabilities, all green lights steady on course and prepared to deliver; the issue had resolved itself, the connection between the Sympatico server and our puny little home computer had come through, and I was finally able to access the Internet.

No kudos whatever to our Internet access provider; there seldom is.