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.
I always find it odd when the Internet isn’t available (usually because we’re switching providers), almost the same as when the power goes out. I think I’ll go do something and remember I can’t because it (power or Internet) isn’t available. But in the case of the Internet, I can always access it through my phone, which is very helpful when there’s a power outage—I can turn to Facebook to find out if others in the area are also without power.
Roger, Time Warner Cable is just another name for Beezelbub. Period.
Of course, I have Charter, so I could tell the same tales. When they hooked up my cable, the installer was “checking my service” by surfing ESPN and other sites. And my virus protection wasn’t hooked up yet. So yeah…
It seems that service providers are the same the world over, at least from conversations I’ve had with people in Austria, Norway, Croatia and India. We’re led to believe that it all happens ín the Cloud’but the reality is that it all relies on bits of wire and junction boxes and the like that are perfectly capable of failing of their own accord. At least when out internet goes down, I get a chunk of money knocked off my bill.