[Ed. note: This story was originally penned in full, from an iPhone on a 3G network, now spellchecked and corrected...]
At Wednesday at 2:45AM, while working feverishly on an 8AM deadline, and steaming music from dubstep.fm, the music stopped. Yeah, it does that sometimes. Usually it starts back on its own, and sometimes I have to physically refresh the link. But it was nearly 3 AM and I was in the zone so I kept trudging along.
A few minutes later I got an error message from my server connection, and it went downhill from there. Once I couldn’t save my changes, I did some light troubleshooting and concluded that “the internet” was down. Was it the Internet, or just me? If the entire Internet was down (not likely), or just Comcast (likely), or just the people on my street/block (extremely likely), then I knew someone would have it fixed by morning. And since it was 3AM, I saved everything locally and went to bed, knowing I still had to get up in 3 hours.
After my Internet went out at 3AM in a middle of a looming deadline, I went to bed and woke up just three hours later, oblivious to reality. After slamming the snooze button three or four times, I finally rolled out of bed and headed off to the kitchen to start a pot of coffee, grabbing the iPad on the way. As the pot was brewing I checked my email like I always do, and saw no new messages. This made sense, since no one in their right mind sends emails between 3 and 6 in the morning. I switched over to Flipboard to get caught up on the news and it had trouble loading.
And that’s when it hit me. “OMG- I’ve got no Internet!”
Remembering the events of the previous evening I stupidly went into the home-office and stared at a now lifeless modem. “No lights”. I thought. Since I deal with this everyday I went straight into troubleshooting mode. Unplug the power… wait… plug it back in… wait. It was during these few minutes that I noticed that my modem was steaming hot. I mean like, “hmm, it that normal?” hot. But maybe that is normal. Either way, I was totally not shocked when the modem didn’t spring to life. Plus, I had a deadline to hit so I decided to forget troubleshooting the device for now.
I went back into the kitchen and poured myself some coffee. Since I couldn’t check my email, and I couldn’t check my news, I figured I’d see what my meeting schedule looked like for the morning… “Oh- that’s online…”. Denied. I made a quick breakfast with the understanding that if I were going to get anything done this morning, I needed to get to the office ASAP.
I sucked down some more coffee and breakfast and proceeded into the “routine” which starts with ironing my shirt and pants for the day and getting caught up on the news. I sparked up the iPad like I always do, set to watch whatever reruns were playing on TWIT.tv while ironing. I pointed the iPad browser to live.twit.tv and realized, “oh- that’s like, the internet too, huh?”. Without TWiT to push me into the day, I finished up the ironing and prepared to jump in the shower.
With the water slowly becoming hot, I booted into Pandora on my iPhone to listen to some music while in the shower. You know- like I always do. But, something was wrong and nothing played. ”Ah,” said I, “damn that Internet!”
Finally I headed out of the house, totally off my game due to 3 hours sleep and thrown out of my routine. While at work I managed to get my presentation completed moments before the actual presentation (it went pretty well too, considering) and went on with the days events.
Toward the afternoon I started compiling my must-complete-before-tomorrow list. ”email such and such… update employee database… check with program partners…” ”ah no worries- I’ll do that when I get home…” (pause) “SON OF A!!” By the end of the day, I had a good 2-4 hours of work to do, that I would typically do on a sofa in slippers, with a glass of Knob Creek and pounding dubstep throughout the house to block out the outside world. I rolled the dice and headed home. I immediately checked the modem to see it was still dead.
Then I spent the next 40 minutes wrestling with Comcast Customer Service- (note to Comcast: Do not try and upsell us while we’re on hold for Customer Service- we are already pissed off at you.) Finally the human says “we can send a guy out anytime between 9am and 5pm…” You know- when most people are at work? Option two: “you can always stop by one of our brick-and-mortars and swap out your modem”. GREAT! I thought- What time are they open? “Monday through Friday, 10am to 6pm”. In a word- USELESS!
We finally scheduled a time for a field tech to come out first thing Saturday morning- It was at this time that I began to realize exactly how much I expect Internet access at the home…
*Follow the Internet Apocalypse here.*
