That recent annoying 23-hour day, I was up early contemplating a blog post. Suddenly, around 8 a.m., the phone went out, as did the Internet. This meant I was feeling disconnected.
Oh, I have the cell phone, but it’s strange: it doesn’t work very well in this house. I can be walking down the street talking to one of my sisters on the phone, walk into my home, and the sound just drops out.
I’ve had enough experience troubleshooting the Time Warner box that I rebooted the who-zee-what’s-it. When it STILL wasn’t working, I called TWC on the aforementioned unreliable-in-my-own-house cellphone. They had no openings until the next day between 3 and 4 p.m.
I COULD have gone to the library, or the local coffeehouse to access my email, but I was tired. And I wanted the opportunity to see how well (or badly) we could operate sans connectivity. We did OK, but I must admit that the youngest of us was a little grumpier than usual not being able to get online.
At the very end of that one-hour window, the TWC guy showed. He had to go out to the street a couple of times, not merely fuss with the device. Within a half-hour, service was restored. My spouse asked, at my urging – I was still at work – whether the outage had anything to do with the TWC truck that was in front of our house just before the service went down. He was unwilling to say, of course, but when the inevitable customer service follow-up robocall came, I was happy to share my theory of the outage.
Anyway, THAT’S why I didn’t read your blogs, or respond to your emails or Facebook comments that day. If you called my landline, it didn’t work. And the world did not end. Still, as soon as I got to work, I quickly perused my 188 emails, all except about a dozen which I quickly deleted.