*heh*
Cable internet down. Our backup dialup connection died for lack of support a year ago. What to do?
Called cable “service” to report the outage. Was put on the list for a repair call… one week and a day from now. *WTF?!?* Escalated the call to a supervisor, voiced my observation that a week and a day was completely unacceptable. Put on hold. “The techs are rolling now.”
Still…
Sitting outside the county public library sucking at the thin pipe it offers, I’m grateful for small blessings. My Wonder Woman really needed to check on some grad work status, and I have my internet addiction to feed, so even a thin pipe on a shaky wireless connection is a blessing.
Modern technology really is something when you think about how far it has come in such a relatively short time, isn’t it? And how fast we get used to the new norm. 🙂
Oh, indeed, Nicole. Almost four years ago (well, 4 months from now it will have been 4 years–that’s “almost” enough for me :-)), when a big ice storm took out power and cable, we were really bummed to be forced to fall back on a dialup connection (since the only reliable utility at all for several weeks was our lil baling wire and twine, mom ‘n’ pop local POTS line). Painful. Of course we were able to snarf up some connectivity at wireless hotspots outside America’s Third World County during those weeks, but traveling thirty miles or more to get a connection was a different kind of PITA.
How quickly we forget from whence we came, eh? I can–just barely–recall my old BBS days connecting, complete with long distance charges, with a 300 Baud modem to a few text-only BBSes. Those were the days…
Follow up: Complete outage by the time an hour had passed from first issues. 24 hrs of outage then full service again. Not bad around here for something that was pretty obviously a fiber cut.