The Storm Hack — Shannon Jones and the Lightning Router

It was meant to be a routine job—just a quick visit to a rural school near Lightning Ridge to fix a dodgy network printer. But if Shannon Jones has taught us anything, it’s that nothing in the Aussie bush ever goes quite to plan.

He rolled into town with Coops riding shotgun, Billo in the back seat munching on meat pies, and Zoe tuning a portable Wi-Fi scanner like a musician tuning her guitar. The school’s headmistress greeted them at the gate, frantic. “The printer’s the least of it. The whole system’s cactus. The storm last night fried half our gear... phones, internet, security cameras, even the smartboard in the Year 5 classroom!”

Inside, the place looked like it had been zapped by a lightning bolt. Probably because it had. A freak outback storm had rolled through and surged straight through their old power system, taking out most of the school’s tech. The kids were thrilled—no schoolwork. The staff? Less so.

Shannon got to work immediately, setting up his mobile toolkit under the humming fluorescent lights. “We’ll need to isolate the damage, reroute power, and get the network back up before the next bell,” he said. Zoe took a team of students on a “tech scavenger hunt” to find every blown-out adapter, fried router, and suspiciously smoking modem. Coops rebooted the backup server while Billo inspected the shed out back to check on the satellite dish, with strict instructions not to touch anything electrical. (He did. It shocked him.)

The biggest problem was the router: completely toasted, and the nearest replacement was a two-day drive away. Shannon frowned, then glanced at the school’s old solar inverter. “We might have what we need,” he muttered. Using parts from the damaged inverter, a backup modem, and a few bits of old-school phone cable, Shannon built what can only be described as a Franken-router.

“It’s ugly,” Zoe said.
“But it’ll work,” Shannon grinned.

He hooked it up, calibrated the settings, and waited. Lights blinked. The server purred. The printer coughed back to life. Then...like magic, the school’s systems lit up, one by one.

“You’ve brought us back from the digital nomad-land,” the headmistress beamed.
“Just another day in the bush,” Shannon shrugged.

As they packed up, a student ran up and asked, “Are you guys superheroes or something?”

Billo winked. “Better—we’re IT.”

They hit the road again, dust trailing behind them, leaving behind a fully connected school and a few awestruck kids who now thought routers were magic and Shannon Jones was the wizard behind it all.