Bang On The Pipe

In most circumstances, if you have a problem in your house with something like wiring, plumbing, gas appliances or whatever which you can't fix yourself, which in my case is almost any problem you can imagine beyond changing a light bulb, you can resolve it by going online and either searching how to do it yourself or contacting a professional who can do it for you.

The one type of situation which cannot be resolved in this manner is the internet connection, which is further stymied if it's actually the phone line which is the problem. People do have mobiles but not always credit, power or lack of enormous heaps of detritus in which to lose them.

Most houses, however, have plumbing. Consequently, I want there to be a protocol whereby, if you have a problem with your internet, you just go in the bathroom or kitchen and turn the taps on and off or visit the bathroom and flush the toilet in Morse code. A transducer of some kind in the taps then communicates hydraulically with a control centre and sends out a service engineer to sort out your internet connection. There is a similarly hydraulic system to identify your street address. If the water supply is out too, you can just bang on the pipes. There's also a trombone-based system for controlling water hammer to send similar messages.

My problem with this is how to get the signals transmitted out of the building all the way to the recipients but I envisage some kind of finer pipes accompanying the water mains and forking off at some point, entering some kind of Heath Robinson/Rube Goldberg fluid-based computing network to work out where you are and despatch the nearest handyperson, In fact I think the whole office should eschew electronics and just be run on plumbing.